Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  He started to speak, struggling with words.

  “Say whatever it is,” I said.

  He cleared his throat. “I had an inkling of what Jumana was talking about. There had been rumors long before you came. But I want you to know that we never talked about you like that.”

  I tried to say something, I don’t know what, to scramble the uneasiness of the conversation.

  “Just let me finish,” he said, rubbing his brow, a habit of discomfort. “I haven’t stopped thinking about what you said to Jumana. It replays in my mind, and every time I admire you more. There’s so much I want to say to you, but now it’s all jumbled in my mouth. There are things I want you to know.” He looked away, sipped his tea, and began again.

  “The way you live your life in our culture, without apology or shame, even if with sadness, makes you extraordinary and special, Nahr. You, more than any of us, are a revolutionary, and the irony is that you don’t even see it,” he said. The real irony, I thought, was that it was only in that moment with him, when I was truly seen and valued, that I did not feel shame.

  “After Mhammad abandoned you, people started to talk. But our mother put a stop to it. I don’t know what was said in her presence, but she responded with rare fury and made it clear she would never enter a home where there was gossip about you, nor would those who spoke it enter hers. That was the last I ever heard such talk of you until Jumana …”

  I was warmed by Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s generosity and love, but I did not want to have this conversation with Bilal. Two baby goats playing a game of tag almost landed in the firepit. Bilal knocked over the kettle trying to push them away.

  As if reading my mind, he said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t even what I wanted to talk about. I want to tell you about Tamara.”

  “What about her?” I tensed at the name.

  “Him.” He held me in his stare. “Tamara is a fake name. Itamar is his real name, the man your husband, my brother … They were lovers. Are lovers … I think. They loved each other. That’s what I wanted to tell you. The real story that sent my brother to prison, then to Kuwait; what made him a collaborator.”

  My body reacted separately from my thoughts. It went limp of its own volition, relieved to hear what it already knew. My body had understood Mhammad’s rejection. It knew it had been powerless to seduce him. At the same time, my mind seized with painful memories—the ways I’d tried and failed to be desirable; the sustained erosion of my dignity; my sense of failure and bewildering abandonment. I had been confused by Jamil’s tears, the man I’d thought was simply Mhammad’s dear friend in Kuwait. But my body knew. My stomach had knotted then. And now I understood. Mhammad had used me. He had robbed me. He was my first rapist, not the man on the beach. And he was also a collaborator, a different kind of rapist.

  “Habibti, are you okay?” Bilal said.

  Bilal called me habibti. “Of course. I’ll always be okay,” I said.

  They met, Bilal said, “on a program that brought Israeli and Palestinian teenagers together when they were in high school. Itamar was an Iraqi Jew. Even back in the seventies, Western do-gooders were trying to bring Palestinian and Israeli kids together, as if our condition was just a matter of two equal sides who didn’t like each other, instead of the world’s last remaining goddamn settler colonial project.”

  He stopped, exasperated with himself. “God, I’m trying to tell you something personal, but it all comes out like a political lecture. Sometimes I think I don’t even know how to have a normal conversation.”

  I slipped my hand into his, squeezing it gently. We had held hands before, but this felt physically and emotionally intimate. The two baby goats stopped in their tracks, then made funny sounds, as if they were talking about us. Bilal and I laughed and leaned back against the tree trunk, our fingers still interlaced.

  “Mhammad was changed by that camp,” Bilal said. “I was only twelve, but I recognized that he was different. He was distant, always gone, and when he was home, he’d just play his oud or write in his diary.”

  Bilal had found the diary and read it as any nosy little brother would. It had spoken of love and longing for Tamara. “He made a point in his diary to write that Tamara spoke Arabic fluently, which seemed strange, but I didn’t think much of it then. They both played the oud, and they bonded over music,” Bilal said.

  Mhammad and Itamar had been shy and awkward, peeling away from the group at the camp. Rumors ignited, and their isolation brought them closer. Eventually they lost their virginity to each other.

  “He wrote about it. I was so curious about this Tamara girl.”

  At some point, Bilal suspected his brother of being a collaborator. “I observed a strange interaction between him and a soldier at a checkpoint. There was a familiarity in the way they looked at each other … like my brother was angry, and the soldier was apologetic.”

  But it would be another two years before the fateful day that set the course of all our lives.

  “Mhammad and I drifted apart,” he said. “I was finishing high school, heading to university, and heavily invested in the resistance. Most of us wanted to join the PLO. It was all we talked about. It made us feel like real men. We thought we were going to liberate Palestine within a few years. My brother was already at university and worked at a restaurant in Jerusalem. Back then, Jerusalem wasn’t yet closed to us. I suppose he was going to see Itamar too. You know, even when they were together, they still called each other Tamara and Delilah—that was my brother’s nickname.”

  “How do you know? I mean, that he was going to see Itamar?”

  Bilal recalled acts of disorganized resistance that had preceded the Intifada. “At first I was just participating in street demonstrations. Later, I did more hardcore planning. Only my comrades knew. We regularly sabotaged shipping trucks and military vehicles with tire-busting nails. At one point, we took out a whole electrical grid to a settlement block.”

  “But what does that have to do with Mhammad and Tamara—I mean, Itamar?”

  “I decided to follow Mhammad once. I needed to be sure he wasn’t a collaborator. It was difficult, because he took two taxis, then went into the woods on foot. But I managed, and when I got close enough, I saw him in a passionate embrace with an Israeli soldier, still in uniform. I was still young, naïve enough that I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. He was kissing a man as he would a woman—and not just a man, but an enemy soldier. Their shirts were off, and they were pawing at one another.” There was palpable disgust in Bilal’s voice. I wondered if it was because his brother was intimate with another man, or because he was intimate with an Israeli soldier.

  Bilal exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke, watched it dissipate. “Then I heard laughing and clapping.

  “Two other soldiers came up on them as they were undoing each other’s pants. They stopped close beside me but didn’t see me hiding. My heart drummed fast and hard in my chest. I had a khanjar knife and quietly pulled it ready. One of the laughing soldiers took a Polaroid of my brother and his lover as they scrambled to put on their shirts. That’s when I leapt, unthinkingly, stabbing a soldier, the curve of the khanjar sliding through his neck and back out. Two shots rang out. I thought I was dead, but I was standing. Itamar’s gun was pointing at me. My brother tackled him to the ground and another shot was fired. Then everything was still. The two laughing soldiers lay at my feet, one shot dead, the other dying from my knife. My brother and Itamar were also on the ground, stunned. Itamar began to cry. I just froze, leaving my body, until my brother shouted, ‘Run! Run away!’ So I did, without looking back, not realizing the khanjar was still in my hand, or that my clothes were bloody, until I came upon three women making bread on a taboon. They saw me, and for a moment we all stiffened with terror.”

  Bilal blew out the last hit of his cigarette, fast and hard, his right hand shaking.

  He wasn’t sure if the women recognized him. They were part of an embroidering club that spanned six villages. His mother
had started it two years before, and they met once a month, often at his home. You’re Zareefeh’s boy, aren’t you? one finally asked. “I was both relieved and horrified by their recognition,” Bilal said. “I collapsed crying, but I couldn’t tell them what had happened. I wasn’t even sure myself.”

  It was the first time I heard that Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s given name was Zareefeh. It means charming. Such a pretty name, I thought.

  One woman asked if he had stabbed an animal or a person.

  “I told the truth, and they asked if the person was Palestinian; if it was a woman or a man; if the person was dead or alive. I uttered the word ‘soldiers’ and they didn’t ask anything more,” Bilal said. Instead they offered him an old black T-shirt one woman had brought to recycle as a rag. He put it on over his bloody shirt. The women packed up their bread and unbaked dough, draped a shawl over Bilal, and walked to their village, where they helped him clean up, washed his clothes, gave him clean ones, and, when it was dark, put him in a taxi to his village. Loading him with fruits, vegetables, and fresh bread, they bade him farewell in front of the driver, as if he had been there all day on an errand for his mother. His wet clothes were tucked at the bottoms of those bags.

  “It was late by the time I got home. Our mother was worried I’d been picked up by the military.” Bilal sucked air through his teeth. “Immi just kissed me and started offering up gratitude and dua’a to God, more intensely than usual. Like she knew something was wrong.”

  I could imagine Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s dua’as: “May God bless you, my sons. May He keep you safe always. O Lord, watch over my boys. Keep their path free of evil… .” I had heard her daily beg the heavens for her sons and for me. “A mother’s dua’as are precious to God’s ears,” she would say.

  Mhammad was already home. Bilal found him in the valley downhill from their house, standing over a fire in a metal barrel. “I walked through the darkness toward him. He turned his face to me, half-illuminated by the flames. We stared at one another for a long while. Didn’t say anything, but we communicated in here.” Bilal put his hand over his heart. “Then he reached for the bundle of clothes in my hand, told me he had already burned his.”

  I wanted to hear the rest of this secret, but the sky was dimming around us. Jandal called to the sheep, and they rose, hurrying toward their shepherd’s voice.

  “It amazes me every time to see this.” Bilal watched the flock. “Sheep are nearly blind, but they can distinguish sounds. Jandal’s voice is their security. They will always go to him. I could make the same call, but they wouldn’t respond.”

  Bilal began packing up. I had seen him go through these motions often, and my heart ached that this would be the last time. The way he contemplated the landscape as he performed banal tasks was a kind of ritualistic farewell. His eyes roamed the rocky hills, the construction in the distance, and he breathed deeply as he folded the blanket, wiped the kettle, and tamped the embers with fistfuls of dirt, watching their last gasps of smoke rise and dissipate.

  The familiar feeling of being alone and lost in the world, unsure of the path forward, had returned to me since that day in the underground. Only bluster and pride concealed the loneliness expanding in me. But now I was overwhelmed by Bilal’s pain, the guilt he must have carried, the impotence I knew he felt seeing those settlements, the anguish over his brother, his mother, the years in prison, the torture, the inability to move, teach, or practice his profession. I wanted to take him in my arms and fix everything.

  All I could do was help carry the tea glasses as we bade Jandal good night.

  We didn’t speak further about Mhammad as we hiked home. Bilal instead gave his usual botanical instructions along the way: “… and this is wild Venus-hair, kuzbarat el ajooz,” he said.

  “Yes, I know. I’ve helped you gather them! How quickly you deny my labor,” I quipped.

  He laughed and turned to me. “Please don’t leave, Nahr.”

  I didn’t respond, except to smile and keep walking.

  “At least consider coming back. This is your country and you always have a home with our family.”

  My decision to leave rested in a clear head. I needed some distance to make sense of events and revelations of the past days. I suppose I had always suspected that Mhammad was gay, but it was real now. What had never occurred to me was that he hadn’t actually killed those soldiers but had gone to prison to protect his younger brother. Again, I felt the ground shift beneath me. I needed the steadiness of something real and familiar. There was still more to this tale, but I needed to be with my family, to feel my mother’s embrace.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, but Jumana is truly sorry. She begged me to convince you to let her apologize in person,” Bilal said, interrupting my thoughts.

  “No.”

  “Okay. I’m not going to push it. But you are wanted, loved, and valued here. And that is not going to change.” Bilal brought me back with those words. I had laid it all out, and he still accepted me and, maybe, loved me. But that time in the underground and the truth about Mhammad had unhinged something between us. I had to leave, even though I knew there was no future for me in Amman.

  The next day I bade Mhammad’s family good-bye and headed to the border crossing at the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. In the three hours I spent in Israel’s “exit interrogation”—What did I do in “Israel”? Where did I go? Who did I see? What’s the name of my mother? My father? My clan? Where was I born? What do I read? What music do I listen to?—I could think of little else but Bilal, imagining going back, running into his outstretched arms.

  V.

  JORDAN, AGAIN

  THE CUBE, UP & DOWN

  A BLACK EYE sits in the center of my sky. A half sphere, dark zit in the ceiling that sees and records everything I do. Hours upon days upon years of me, sleeping, bathing, reading, masturbating, brushing my teeth, braiding my hair, dancing, talking to myself, singing, carving the walls and my skin with my nails, hitting my head against the wall, shitting, pissing, dressing.

  That’s all there is in my sky. Gray paint with a dome camera. I wonder why the spiders never go there, why they don’t weave a web over it.

  The floor of my universe is just like the walls, gray concrete, only it slopes slightly toward Attar, where a drain is hidden under a perforated dome.

  Klara, the Russian guard, is back after a long absence. I missed her. We don’t really talk much. She says a few nice things to me sometimes, and I answer, trying to strike up a conversation, but she usually doesn’t answer or simply says she can’t talk. She’s still trying to get me some books on communism. She once entered my cell when I wasn’t locked to the wall, which I took as a gesture of solidarity. If I don’t plug my security bracelets in when they buzz, the Cube fills with a high-pitched sound that rings in my brain for hours. I can control only the direction I face when I lock them in.

  I suppose wanting some control in my little world is also why I used to try to clog the toilet, to make it overflow, just to make something happen. To make a decision, formulate a plan, implement it, and suffer the results. I took off my shirt, stuffed it in the toilet, but it would not flush until I removed the shirt, as if mocking my effort. I tried again, only I shat in it that time, but it still wouldn’t flush. I waited until I felt defeated, and retrieved my shirt from my own excrement. I had to wait for Attar just to wash it out. It took a while—several meals and multiple light/dark cycles. The stench was terrible. Finally the toilet flushed, and everything went back to normal. I lost.

  My body rebelled in here too. My muscles shrank to the point that I could close the fingers of both hands around one thigh. Eventually it became too difficult to get up. That’s when the guards began taking me out of the Cube, blindfolded. The first few walks were brief and assisted, until I could walk on my own. I take these blindfolded walks regularly now, but I don’t know how often or for how long. As I’ve already said, time is immeasurable in here. I can, however, tell you that sometimes I am tak
en outdoors, other times somewhere indoors. The light and darkness of this earth are different from that of a building. The first time I felt the sun on my skin, I thought I would sell my soul to feel it again. But I didn’t have to. They let me visit the sun again. Even blindfolded, it is glorious. But most of the exercise times are indoors, though I admit I often worry that Attar might arrive while I’m away.

  MONEY SOFTENS THE HEART

  JEHAD WAS WAITING for me when I emerged from Jordanian customs. We held each other in an embrace made of love and our unspoken yearning for something lost and gone. For home, perhaps, or innocence. For Baba. Or a sense of security, or just to be close the way we were before our secrets and traumas wedged between us. “We’ve missed you, Sis.”

  “I missed you more, donkey.”

  “Aaaah … she’s back!”

  My brother and I chatted on the way back from the crossing, but my mind kept returning to Palestine as he made his way in a rusted 1980 Peugeot through Amman’s awful traffic. I hadn’t slept well the night before, lying in bed with the fresh memory of the past hours with Bilal and his unfinished story, and I had left early for the border crossing. Bilal had driven me, risking arrest for being outside his designated perimeter. But we hadn’t spoken much, our journey to the border oppressed by the weight of much still unsaid.

  My brother wanted to hear about my trip, about Bilal, and most of all about my sense of Palestine. Unlike me, he had always felt his roots and longed for the home that was his birthright.