by Amy Gustine
The strip is twelve kilometers at its widest, forty-one long. For three days she lines up her steps with the sun’s arc from land to sea. One time an older girl narrows her eyes. “My brother is in jail in Israel and my mother cannot visit.” When the girl runs off, shouting something R’s mother can’t understand, she hurries away, hiding for an hour in an abandoned market.
Another time a different girl asks why she is stooped.
“I’ve been walking a lot and my back hurts.”
“You should stop walking.”
“I can’t.”
She traverses the sand and rubble fields between towns, and on the fourth day reaches Khan Yunis, a town whose busy streets add the smell of motorbike exhaust to the relentless odor of sea salt and fish. That night she hides in a yellow boat, a tangle of net for a pillow, for her blanket, a filthy tarp. The odors have become her. She will smell of dead things from now on.
Near dawn, her dreams are infused with a man’s mourning call. R is dead. The man, whom she doesn’t know, is rending garments, crying out during Kriah. Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, the True Judge.
She starts awake, her heart beating fast. The smoky predawn sky swells with a quivering ululation. The voice rises, buzzing, hits a single bell-like note, drops again. Not mourning. Only morning. The muezzin’s call to prayer.
R’s mother drifts back to sleep and is wakened by a giggling group of boys calling her a fish, pointing at her feet, which have become entangled in a second net. One boy, around thirteen, with a face all teeth and eyes, helps free her. She shows him the pictures of R. In the most recent one R stands outside their apartment building on graduation day, squinting against the sun. The photo has absorbed water from the boat’s bottom, and when the boy takes it, a gash opens across R’s leg. The boy gazes at the photo several seconds before saying in slow, badly pronounced English, “I see him.”
They make arrangements. She will wait for him to fish with his uncle and then he’ll take her where she wants to go. R’s mother, heart pounding, sits on a sewer pipe at the beach’s edge. The day is overcast and boats can’t go far without risk of being fired on by Israeli ships. Still, she keeps an eye on the boy’s skiff, ignoring the women in the nearby camp who watch her while they hang laundry. They recognize an outsider, but hardly imagine a matronly Jew has smuggled herself in.
Two hours later the boy and his uncle drag the boat onto the sand, weight it against wind and tides with jagged cement blocks and carry their rods and buckets to a path that leads into the streets. R’s mother follows at a good distance until they go into one of the cinder-block houses, then she crosses the street and waits inside the remains of a hotel, its first floor open to the sky. Creatures scratch in the rubble, so she climbs onto a section of fallen wall, using its exposed rebar as a ladder.
When the boy emerges, shuffle-running in front of a donkey hauling two men on a flat metal cart, R’s mother scrambles down, and they walk several blocks to a house with a Palestinian flag painted next to the door, its colors turned cinereal over the concrete’s porous face. The boy slips inside and returns shortly to ask for a hundred shekels, shrugging to indicate the greed is not his. They repeat this process at two more houses. In both, R’s mother hears a baby crying and smaller children playing. At another market, she buys a loaf of bread and some nuts and they sit on the curb.
“Are we getting close?” she asks in Arabic.
The boy nods. “Yep,” he says in English. “Okeydokey.”
She’s never heard the phrase before and asks what it means. He explains it is an American word, as if that is enough.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“How old are you?”
“Old enough for respect.”
He smirks. “Yes, Grandma.”
She fakes a glower. “What is your name?”
“Jamil.”
She can tell he’s lying. “Jamil, what is your favorite subject in school?”
“School is a waste of time.”
“My son used to tell me that all the time. He liked to learn, but he didn’t like to go to school.”
The boy looks chagrined. “I know what I need to.”
He takes her from place to place, asking for money sometimes, other times not. Once he disappears in a crowd and she doesn’t expect him to reappear. This is all a ruse, of course. He can’t help her. Then he’s there, hand on her sleeve. They go down a street where most of the houses have been reduced to rubble. A group of boys is playing capture the flag. The boy is greeted warmly and huddles with the others, speaking in hushed tones. Light pours down on the dark, tousled heads. No trees or buildings to cast cooling shadows. Only broken trapezoids of gray scattered among the ruins. The boys are deciding how to fool her. She wants to suggest they write out directions on where to find her son and send her on her way. By the time she discovers their duplicity, they can be home, in bed.
The boys scatter among the ruins just as the ululating voice swells again for midday prayer. For the next several minutes R’s mother stands frozen in the middle of the road, her own shadow creeping away, though her body knows not what to do. Which direction do you face? What name do you call out? How do you hold your hands in reverence? She is exposed, incapable of escape, a figure encased by a sniper’s target circle. Then the boy emerges from a pile of concrete, motions for her to be quiet, grabs the pink rag and dances down the street, avoiding the telltale pebbles in favor of toe-sized patches of smooth concrete. The voice, still keening, camouflages the noise of her less adept escape.
At the base of a wall covered in blue Arabic letters R’s mother can’t read, the boy lays down the rag. On the other side of the wall is a field of tents. He signals for her to wait and disappears through a gap. He won’t come back. There are probably a dozen entrances. She settles against the wall anyway. Occasionally men glance at her, but she is covered head to toe, and they must assume she is waiting on a husband. Motorbikes and the occasional mud-splattered car pass. R’s mother grows sleepy, wonders what might happen if she lay down here and said enough.
At the backfire of a motorbike she opens her eyes. A trio of camels, tethered in line with a rope, gets away from an old man a block off. They lope past, followed at some distance by the man, limping and swearing. Just then the boy returns. Taking in the situation, he catches up to the camels and grabs at the swinging rope. R’s mother shouts in Hebrew to be careful, he’ll get trampled.
At the sound of the language, several men stop and stare at her. Four approach, one with yellow teeth like shellacked maple, another with sea-green eyes. The old man keeps running, hollering at the boy.
The stack of pictures, less the one the boy still has, sits like a brick in her purse. The man with green eyes snatches the bag, embroidered with reeds and a red-throated loon. Asking a question she can’t understand, he holds up a picture. She opens her mouth, but her Arabic has fled. The picture is of R on his thirteenth birthday, his teeth at their largest, his hair its most wild. It is the day she told him the truth.
Hooves clattering in a great arrhythmic panic draw the men’s attention. The camels are being driven back this way by a motorbike careening around potholes. R’s mother presses herself against the tent-city’s wall while the men scatter. The camels go by and the bike skids to a stop. She climbs on behind the boy, who just manages to restart before the men put it all together and chase them down the street, hollering in Arabic, “Stop, you Jew, stop!”
“We have to go back!” she shouts. “They have my pictures!”
The boy firmly shakes his head.
Khan Yunis goes by in gray, the occasional flash of red or purple through the open door or half-wall of a destroyed home. R’s mother closes her eyes and releases her breath in short, shallow puffs, trying to fuse all two hundred and six bones into one solid structure. Pebbles kicked up by the bike’s wheels sting her ankles.
Several minutes later, having lost their pursuers, they slow to a speed barely able to
keep them upright, punctuated every few seconds by a sudden leap forward, as if the bike were being prodded by a whip. The boy stops in the rubble street where his friends were playing. “It’s late,” he says, “good luck,” then begins running—not fast, like escape. More like exercise. But fast enough for her to know she can’t keep up. Except he has her only picture. Without it, she can’t find her son.
R’s mother runs. A knife in her side, pounding heart, burning feet. It is only because the boy runs for fun, out of habit, that she is able to keep him in sight. All the streets look the same, and she knows if he makes even a single turn without her seeing, all will be lost.
She rounds a corner, eyes tracking every direction. In front of a building like all the rest, the boy is talking to a woman who, by her unabashed chastising, can only be his mother. She is pointing inside, then down the block. He should go, then come right back.
R’s mother hangs back until the boy reaches the next block, then makes her way toward his mother. She is wringing out a towel, the water forming dark bubbles in the sandy street. As the woman turns to go inside, shoulders stiff and bent toward some urgent task, the ululating voice calls out. Over it a cry escapes the house, and she quickly shuts the door.
R’s mother knows that cry.
Cautiously, she nudges open the door. In the back room of the two-room home a sheet hanging from nails in the ceiling partially conceals a woman in labor. When the boy’s mother touches the rag to her forehead, she turns, and R’s mother sees an elegant nose, high cheekbones, wet eyes. But she is not a woman; she is a girl.
“Can I help?” R’s mother asks.
The story unspools quickly after the boy returns with the water. He thrusts R’s photo at his mother, summarizes their afternoon of seek and flee, then explains the girl’s plight. She is the daughter of his mother’s childhood friend. Unmarried, she ran away from her home in a town north of here to hide from her brothers.
“If they find her,” he says, “they will kill her.”
The statement is equally true of R’s mother. The boy’s mother insists she leave. “You endanger us.”
The girl’s labor isn’t progressing well, and when R’s mother tells them she is a nurse and offers to check the baby’s position, the boy’s mother relents.
The baby is face up, with a shoulder lodged down. R’s mother explains what needs doing. As she works, the girl whimpers and the woman hushes her, afraid the neighbors will hear.
Once the baby is righted, R’s mother prepares to leave, but the girl grabs her arm. “Don’t go.”
Though the sun has set and the mourning voice must have called out, none of them hear it. They don’t become aware of the call to prayer until the final voice of the day, by which time they’ve undressed the girl to a thin white shirt soaked with sweat. R’s mother massages her feet while the boy and his mother kneel and rise, kneel and rise by the light of candles, their shadows pulsating on the wall like hearts imaged with sound waves. The world has been praying for thousands of years. When, R’s mother wonders, does God plan to answer?
After prayer, the boy’s mother goes to blow out the candles.
“I need to see,” R’s mother objects.
“They will be wondering,” the woman says, “after Isha.” This is the name for when all the light has left the sky. A house with precious candles lit so late will arouse suspicion.
R’s mother considers how to hurry things along. “I need something to break her water.”
It takes several minutes to put her meaning across, but finally the woman sends the boy into the front room, where under a floorboard he’s hidden a bag of scrap metal.
“I sell it,” he explains, laying out the bag’s contents—copper wires, screws with damaged threads, shavings, one and two-inch pieces of pipe cutoffs. The copper could work. It’s stiff enough to offer pressure, flexible enough to bend into a hook.
They sterilize the wire in boiling water, then R’s mother ruptures the amniotic sac and the contractions intensify. The girl bites a rag while the woman describes her own labors. They all end happily, with shining baby and tired mother.
The girl looks to R’s mother. “What about you?” she sputters around the rag. “You have a son. Was his birth easy?”
R’s mother wipes her brow and smiles. “Happiness is sometimes the other side of another’s misery.” But she is speaking Hebrew, so the girl smiles back, assuming the best.
Another contraction begins. R’s mother cups the girl’s kneecaps in her palms. “I see a head,” she says in Arabic. “Push, press down hard.”
The girl lifts herself on her elbows, clenches her teeth, and lets out a tiny squeal. The baby’s full head emerges. With a great huff, the girl lies back. “Tell us in Arabic,” she says. “Your birth was safe?”
R’s mother cradles the baby’s forehead, waiting for the next contraction to release the shoulders. “My boy came from the earth,” she says.
“Did you grow him on a vine?” the girl smirks.
From the other side of the curtain the boy says, “I bet he was a root vegetable, like a potato.”
His mother leans around the sheet to give him a dirty look, but he and the girl continue to giggle until the next contraction takes them by surprise and the girl lets loose a soft scream.
“We’re almost there,” R’s mother says.
The woman lifts the girl by her shoulders, and as she pushes, R’s mother tells her story.
The year her son was born quakes shook old Byzantium, the earth mother’s tectonic bones grinding against one another until a final shudder pushed him free, a dark-haired, olive-skinned infant set adrift in disaster’s bulrush and washed up in the rubble of an Istanbul street. She was there as part of a medical emergency crew when he was brought in. No identification, no way to track down family. She cared for him for two months, waiting for someone to come looking, but no one did. No Kurd, Turk, Greek, Muslim, or Christian. So she took him home. “Why not?” she says. He was as likely to belong to a barren Israeli Jew as to anyone.
The day after the baby is born, R’s mother announces she is going to resume her search. “I need the picture back.”
The boy is drawing it from his pocket when his mother shakes her head and holds out a hand to stop him. “You will get yourself killed,” she tells R’s mother. “And us. Go back to Israel. There is nothing you can do.”
“I just need my picture, and I will be gone.” R’s mother reaches for it, but the boy dashes from the house. He is a block away, running toward the beach, by the time she gets out the door. By the time her feet sink into sand, her breath is gone and a great pain has bloomed in her side. The boy is nowhere to be found.
Hours later he shows up with a falafel and offers her half.
R’s mother is rocking the baby from a stationary chair, moving her torso forward and back in a steady rhythm to keep them both calm. “Where is my picture?” she asks, without breaking stride.
Laughing, the boy makes a wave with his slender brown hand. “The water took it.”
For two weeks she wanders the streets, eavesdropping on conversations and occasionally describing R to a group of children. “Have any of you seen him?”
The boy’s mother begs her to stop.
“If it were him,” R’s mother points to the door to indicate the boy, gone out combing the rubble for metal scraps and helping his uncle fish, “if it were him, would you stop?”
When she is not searching, R’s mother holds the baby so the girl can sleep. The plan is to get her into Egypt, where the boy’s mother has distant family, but she can’t take the baby. “They won’t help her if they know.”
After the girl is gone, the boy’s mother will claim to have found the infant abandoned in a dumpster.
One day a friend of the boy’s is killed, backed over by a garbage truck during their foraging sessions at a nearby trash heap. After that, the boy stays home, stripping the insulation off copper wires with a rusty paring knife. His hands are crisscro
ssed with fine cuts where the knife slipped. He melts the lingering lamina over the gas stove, letting it drip onto a piece of cheap tin he’s sacrificed for the purpose, the different colored plastics rehardened into an intricate, overlapping pattern like veins and arteries.
R’s mother continues to go out, but increasingly finds her mind wandering when she should be examining faces, catching scraps of conversation. Everyone has begun to look familiar, harmless.
One afternoon she is in the market, standing half-concealed by a pillowcase hung to shade the orange vendor, a wizened old man who hums while rearranging his fruit. She’s bought a bag of garbanzos, fish, and mustard greens, and is bagging her oranges when twenty men walking in pairs split the crowd, their presence moving ahead of them in a conspicuous quieting and turning away. Hamas. They wear black shirts and pants, green headbands with white writing in Arabic and white cloths over their faces. Only their eyes, two dark nostril holes and the inside-out flesh of lips remain visible. Even R could be hiding among them and his mother wouldn’t know.
She dashes into the street and in a flash the men turn, point rifles, a few women let out screams, somewhere a box is knocked over and a hundred somethings click on the sidewalk. The oranges roll out of her bag and R’s mother collapses, frantically gathering the fruit. She feels the men assessing her, deciding she is no threat. They realign and march on. The vendor resumes his hum, placing the good fruit in back, the bruised up front. R’s mother looks up to see the last dark figure round the corner and pass out of sight.
Crying with humiliation and self-loathing, she doesn’t notice the two men in jeans follow her away from the market. She is nearly back to the boy’s house when the one wearing a blue oxford sneezes and she becomes aware of them. Something about the way they both look away when she turns alerts her, so she passes the boy’s house, keeping her eyes straight ahead, walks three more blocks, then doubles back to the market. There, she dodges and sidesteps, getting lost amid the other women’s thobes.
For hours she crisscrosses the city, looking for the blue shirt. By the time she feels it safe to go home, it is very late and she must make up a story about getting lost.
