by Mai Al-Nakib
There was that. There was also my plan to become a writer and maybe even a professor of literature. I know it sounds oddly specific for someone so young, but it was my dream, what I wanted more than anything. I couldn’t really tell anyone. It’s not that education wasn’t supremely important to my parents. I had heard my father say about a million times that everything could be taken from you but nobody could ever steal what you knew. A degree was a passport to anywhere. Of course, all the education and degrees in the world couldn’t get a young Palestinian a job in London or New York City or even Kuwait. That was fine because I didn’t want to leave the West Bank anyway. Birzeit University was Harvard to me. Education mattered to my parents – they figured a degree in medicine, engineering, law, architecture. My father loved literature but not as a career for his youngest and brightest. I tried to keep my goals hidden. I wasn’t ready to confront my parents. Yet it was impossible to hide my visits to the library or my head in my books at all hours. Even now, if I squint hard enough, organize my concentration on one point just ahead of me, I can almost see myself then, slouched against the wall in the corner of our tiny garden beside the rack my mother used to store green bottles, lost in some novel or scribbling away in my brown notebook, the world blowing up behind my back. My mother would yell at me to step outside the walls of our home. “Ya Allah, Nimr, move!” But unless I calculated Sireen would be coming back from or leaving to some place at precisely that moment, I would usually stay put.
Incidentally, I had the coolest name ever. Nimr means tiger in Arabic. I’m sure my parents were highly amused. I can just see them chuckling. While not exactly ferocious, I was moderately dashing with dark eyes that pierced and turned downward like small parentheses. My lips seemed adequate, not too plump like a girl’s, not too thin like an old man’s. My nose was slightly aquiline but, I thought, in an elegant, ancient Roman sort of way. I was tall, over six-foot, and lanky. I guess maybe I was too thin, not built-up or muscular like my friends. I didn’t much mind, though it probably made me less of a tiger than I would have liked. The only real downside to my looks, as far as I could tell, was that I had no hair. That didn’t come out quite right. I had hair on my head – thick and dark. I had hair thick and dark in a few other places, too, come to think of it. But I had no hair on my face to speak of, nothing at all on my chest, hardly any on my arms, and only a few threads on my legs. I thought this was painfully unmanly and particularly unfitting a man called, of all things, Nimr.
My friends liked me. They thought my dark humor suited our suspended, crazy life. I amused them even if I annoyed the hell out of them because I didn’t list weapons or smoke Marlboros. Mostly I would read to them from my notebook to pass the time. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I liked to write:
Ammo Musa’s belly is getting bigger by the second. He swears it has something to do with the water, that the Zionists spike our water with hormones that cause “inflated belly syndrome.” He says they do this because if Palestinians are walking around with inflated bellies, they’re not going to be able to fight. When I point out to Ammo Musa that he’s one of the few people I know with a belly the size of the Dome of the Rock, he says to wait and see, that it’s only a matter of time before everyone starts tottering around like him. I can’t get out of my head the image of Ammo Musa and his big-bellied posse, their limbs tied together behind their backs with silk ropes, floating peacefully over Palestine like hot air balloons.
Because my friends were fond of my stories and, for the most part, me, they were usually sympathetic and discreet about the hair thing. But they slipped up enough to alert me to the fact that this hairlessness might be a real problem, chiefly with the girls. It was something I worried about in my fourteenth year and for most of my fifteenth too. That is, until Sireen whispered to me that she liked my glassy face since it didn’t scratch hers up when we kissed. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So how does a fifteen-year-old aspiring Casanova and future Nobel Laureate get himself blown up? To answer I need to go back ten months before the date of my death. I was fourteen and already concerned with the things I would continue to fret over at fifteen – girls, the future, my body hair situation. It was a brisk December morning in 1989. The sky was so blue it was almost black. Rami and I were standing outside my garden wall, Rami smoking, looking as cool as a cowboy, and me standing around with my hands in my jeans pockets. Our high school had been shut down again. We didn’t have much to do. I was hoping Sireen’s school was shut down too so I could watch her walking home. A couple of kids we knew came up to us and bummed cigarettes off Rami. I had grown up with these guys. Ghassan and Tarik had bullied us all through elementary school. They weren’t your everyday, garden-variety playground jerks. These guys had a wicked nasty streak. I had seen them punch kids in the kidneys and cut the tops of their arms with pocket knives. They were angry boys without fathers. Ghassan’s dad had been killed and Tarik’s dad was missing, either dead or in prison. Their mothers did their best, but they were overwhelmed and tired, and these two were untamable, out in the streets from sun up till sun down. With the intifada, they had found their calling. They organized children in the neighborhood. They claimed to have contacts in high places. Maybe they did. They seemed to. I was never one to question the nationalist credentials of anyone, and if Ghassan and Tarik were finally putting their anger to good use, who was I to doubt their intentions? From where I am now, all that patriotic razzle-dazzle falls decidedly flat. But Ghassan and Tarik were scary to me then and I wanted nothing to do with them. That morning, all they did was take a couple of cigarettes from Rami and go on their way without a word. I had a bad feeling.
The next morning, the same scene played over. Rami and I were outside, Ghassan and Tarik sauntered toward us, took cigarettes, then went off without comment or question. My bad feeling congealed in my chest. I could tell they were making some sort of assessment, thinking something through, with Rami and me at the heart of whatever it was. On the third morning, the day before our school was scheduled to reopen, they came along again. This time they stayed. They lit their cigarettes, sucked smoke between their teeth, glanced from me to Rami and back, and asked us if we believed in Palestine. It was nowhere close to what I had expected. I had anticipated blackmail, harassment, some clever form of exploitation, not this demented question about our loyalty to the homeland. I didn’t know what to say, so I let Rami do the talking.
“Of course we believe in Palestine!” There was a weird edge to his voice. Rami was a good guy, the kind of guy parents love and parties come to life for. He was terrific to be around because he was always so relaxed. He made everything easy. Plus, he was supremely good-looking. Even more than me. He made the girls swoon. Together we were Robert De Niro and a young Marlon Brando (though taller and without the build). Rami wasn’t comfortable around Ghassan and Tarik. Like me, like all of us, he had been roughed up plenty by them. Unlike us, he wasn’t afraid of them.
“What kind of people do you think we are? Palestine belongs to us. We would do anything for it.” Rami was passionate and adamant.
“Yeah, but would you die for it?” Ghassan’s eyes were slits.
“Of course we’d die for it! We risk death walking to school everyday and lying on our asses every night! What are you talking about?” Rami was on a roll.
“Not that kind of death. Would you volunteer to die for Palestine?”
“Like how?” I ventured.
“Like strapping a bomb to your belly and exploding yourself in a café or bus stop or school.”
I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t say anything, but Rami was pissed off now. “Yeah we would. We’d do anything.” He shouldn’t have said it. I knew Rami; he didn’t mean it. But he did say it and he shouldn’t have.
“Okay then. You’re our kind of Palestinian. We’ll let you know what to expect. Good boys.”
Tarik was an idiot. What the hell was he thinking? He was no older than us. The whole situation was preposterous. I
t had to stop immediately.
“Look, we’ve got to go. My mother’s waiting.” A supremely lame comeback.
“You go home to your mother now, fierce little tiger. Go on. But we’ll be letting you know. We will let . . . you . . . know.”
We were in trouble.
I obsessed over what it was exactly that Ghassan and Tarik were going to let us know. Months went by without us hearing a thing, but our encounter still left me frantic. We’d often see the two of them around, and every once in a while they’d give us a sleazy little wink or ask Rami for cigarettes. However, they didn’t let us know anything. I spent countless hours rehearsing what it could be that Ghassan and Tarik would want from us. The best case scenario was that we would be made gofers, running between the high-ups and the down-belows. I saw guns passing hands. I saw Turkish coffee with a layer of froth on top served to big men. I saw maps and fake IDs carried furtively from anonymous bunkers to the familiar homes of friends and family. This didn’t seem too bad. I could do it, was more than willing to do it, even if it cut into my private time. I would think of it as an adventure, my special contribution to the cause or – why not? – research for my writing. I tried to convince myself that would be the extent of it. But I couldn’t get Ghassan’s squinty little pig eyes and gravelly voice out of my head. He had said something about a bomb and exploding ourselves in a school or café. It was this, I knew from the acid in my stomach, they would be letting us know.
I created elaborate images of dynamite sticks attached to elastic belts strapped around my waist. I pictured Rami strapping me and then me strapping Rami. I saw us kiss each other on the cheeks and then swat each other sharply on the backs. Then, freak that I am, I watched the front of my pants darken with piss. I saw Rami look away in disgust. I felt myself wanting to stay behind but going anyway. I saw us slip through the soldiers, make our way toward one of the settlements, to an elementary school or a nursery. Rami would always go first. I’d watch mesmerized as Rami blew himself up. His chest ripped away from his back, exposing his broken ribs. His head exploded and made a bubble wrap sound. His insides shot out of his neck in chunks. I saw his body fizzle to nothing. Then I saw the kids. Clumps of their teeth and hair and fingers and toes. Their deflated footballs and burning comic books. Their eyes closed and their small chests collapsing. I noticed pink mist in the air. I heard their screams and smelled their charring skin. Then I’d stop. I could picture my best friend Rami exploding and the stormy little deaths of children. I could plot it all out and, deep down, even enjoy plotting it out. Imagining my own death, however, I could not suffer. I was a coward.
By the end of July, I was still positive we weren’t off the hook, but I spent much less time fixated on what Ghassan and Tarik were planning. Rami appeared to have forgotten all about it as early as a couple of weeks after the incident, and he would make fun of me whenever I brought it up – less and less as the months went by. Though I had relaxed a little and sometimes would go for weeks without thinking about it, I knew, I just knew, it wasn’t over yet.
That August I was in heaven. No, not dead yet. Heaven on earth with a houri named Sireen. I mentioned before, Sireen and I often played visual pursuit. We’d done so since we were about eleven, the year our worlds split apart. It was the year girls started to play only with other girls and us guys moved away from them completely. I really missed the company of girls, though naturally I hid my feelings from my buddies, who at that point seemed more interested in girlie pictures than real girls. I think I must have always loved Sireen, even when she was little. I would never have said anything to her or to any of my friends, but I do remember informing my mother when I was about six or seven that I planned on marrying Sireen. My mother – I can still see the tiny smile in her eyes – was sweetly supportive. For four long years there was nothing but eye contact between Sireen and me. That summer, however, we were looking for something more.
I was standing with Rami outside my house, as usual. It was hot. We were sweaty. I saw Sireen walking back alone from somewhere. Rami, prince of princes, chose this moment to go inside to use the bathroom. I didn’t ask him to, and I don’t think he was being considerate. Why would he be? Sireen and I hadn’t spoken in ages. As far as anyone knew, there was nothing between us. Sireen, spotting me alone, walked up to me. She did it as if she had been doing it for years. She came in really close. I could smell her. She was sweating too, but her sweat, unlike mine, smelled of jasmine.
“I’ve been watching you.”
“You have?”
“I have. There’s a chink in our garden wall. I spy on you. What are you always writing in that notebook?”
“Stuff. About people. And things.”
“Do you write about me?”
“I do.”
“What do you say?”
“That your hair looks like Medusa’s.”
“Did you know your lips are the color of pomegranates?”
I remember telling myself to calm my breathing. I felt a grenade in my gut. I felt my shoulders go numb.
“No. I didn’t realize.”
“Do you think you’re going to die young?”
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear. If I said no, would she think less of me? If yes, that I was some kind of fanatic?
“I’m not sure. I hope not.”
“Do you like me?” She was a girl with guts.
“Yes. Very much.”
“Good. Should we start seeing each other?”
“Yes.”
I found the chink in our garden wall. She had a view of me in my corner. My view of her depended on her mood. Sometimes she would sit coyly on one of the garden chairs reading a book. Other times, usually when her parents were out, she would lie in the grass, her shirt casually scrunched up so I could catch a glimpse of her naked waist, sometimes even the lift of her breasts. Her feet, her thighs, her arms, her neck. I got to know her in pieces. Without planning, we figured out whose turn it was to pose and whose turn to stare through the gap. We had to be careful not to get caught by our parents. It was thrilling. I spent my days and nights buzzing. We would leave notes to each other in the chink. All the writing I had ever done had been for this. If Sireen fell in love with me, it was because of my letters to her. Her letters, less polished, were full of a wildness I had always suspected. That August, we shared a secret in the layers of our skin. Never touching, hardly in each other’s presence face-to-face, but always together in writing and in our wall-framed sightings of each other.
In early September, a few days before school was tentatively scheduled to begin – I say tentatively because you never knew when it would be decided that our education was a real threat to Israel’s security and had to be postponed for a few days, weeks, months – Sireen slipped me the following note: Meet me here at midnight. I thought I might collapse reading Sireen’s note, that my knees would give. I pushed my body against the gap, plugging it so she couldn’t see me trembling.
Those hours between reading that note and midnight were the best of my life. Everything seemed possible. Ghassan and Tarik were forgotten. Guns and bombs stopped falling. My dead friends and their lost fathers were lazing around in gardens bursting with late-summer bougainvillea. I could hear sea waves because we lived, not in the West Bank, but in the coastal town where my grandfather was born. My brothers and I together made four and not one of us had to be sacrificed for the cause like a lamb. My friends listed their favorite athletes and rock stars. They didn’t know what weapons were. We were hopeful and we were special. We would become doctors and lawyers and engineers and writers and we would change the world and the way people think about the world. We had the luxury to contemplate a universe beyond our borders: starvation and disease, the environment and animal vivisection, other people’s wars, but, also, the beauty of stars, the miracle of birds and fish finding their way home. Palestine was a place like any other, where great things could happen.
It wasn’t hard for Sireen and me to sneak
out of our homes around midnight, to meet at our garden wall. It wasn’t hard to walk through our gates, to find a quiet alley in the dark. It wasn’t hard to look into her eyes, to touch, finally, the corners of her lips, her neck, her shoulders, her waist, the pieces of her I had memorized. I couldn’t hold her in my arms like they do in the movies. Some things are simply too much. Her breath smelled of oranges or apricots, maybe both. She was wearing a white top – was it a short nightgown? – and jeans. We were there for no more than twenty minutes. We hadn’t said a word to each other, but right before it was over she whispered, “Tomorrow. Again.”
And so it was, in the late weeks of summer or early weeks of autumn, again and again and again. Meeting in the dark alley, kissing parts of Sireen, touching more and more of her at once, whispering questions.
“Do you eat olives for breakfast?”
“Yes. Do you like to swim?”
“Yes. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A writer. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A mathematician. I think about numbers and shapes. What do you dream?”
“Of you. What do you dream?”
“Of dancing on the beach till dawn in a silver dress.”
“Did you know your fingers look transparent in the light?”
“Yes. Did you know you have a face like glass? It makes me want to lick it.”
I was at once mortified (my hairless face!) and incredibly aroused (Sireen wanted to lick me!).
As you can imagine, my life that September was a jump off a tall building, a walk under water. Everything fell away or floated around me until midnight. Now I know that the next part had to happen precisely when it did. The devil strolls in when angels get comfortable. I say “devil” and “angels” not because they’re here – like the houris, they’re nowhere to be found – but because they’re so familiar, so immensely popular. Looking into your world from where I am, not something I can do with ease – it takes an ocean of concentration and the patience of a mountain – I realize that the minute things seem good will always be the instant the avalanche descends. This is one of the most important insights I’ve had in this skeletal void. Your parents spend everything they have on a new home; a bulldozer flattens it and crushes your youngest brother. You find the perfect job; your mother gets sick and you must quit to take care of her until the gruesome end. After years of delay, a matching liver is found for your best friend; he dies in a car waiting to get through a checkpoint manned by indifferent soldiers, the hospital fifteen minutes away. These things happen all the time. If you knew how often, maybe you’d stop being able to live. Or maybe you would live for the first time, without devils or angels.
