by Mai Al-Nakib
In any case, it came, later rather than sooner, and exactly the way I figured. It was around mid-October and the weather was great – fresh and full of anticipation. Rami and I, at that moment, the sheriffs of youth and glory, were striding home from school. I glimpsed Ghassan and Tarik out of the corner of my eye. Motherfuckers. I wanted to speed up, wanted to run away, was ready to face the humiliation and shame of running away, coward that I was. Anything would have been better than what they were going to let us know. Blowing ourselves up in a school or at a bus stop. Let them jeer and point. I wanted to dance till dawn with Sireen, to feel her lick my face. I wanted to slow down time, to stretch it into the future, to let the past go. But there they were before us, the two bullies of the West Bank, there to blow us up and crush our bones. They asked Rami for cigarettes. I wanted to inhale jasmine and orange. They tried to smile at us, their gray teeth, their slits for eyes. They were telling us they were on our side, the side of our lost homeland. We were going to get it back together. I heard “assignment” and “operation.” I heard “outdoor café” and “weekend.” I heard “a belt of explosives” and “houris in paradise.” I heard words coming out of their mouths I would never have guessed they knew: “maximize civilian casualties” and “venerated martyrs,” “tactical gain” and “the greater good.” They had let us know, and they would be letting us know more in the next couple of days. “Not a word to anyone. Not even each other.” The encounter was over in a flash.
Now I knew. There it was spread out before me, a really bad hand. I wasn’t going to do it. I immediately told Rami I wasn’t going to. It was a relief to say it after all those months. It was a small liberation, a private expression of manliness to say no. I was a real tiger after all. Rami looked at me like I was insane. “They’ll kill you.”
“I refuse. I won’t and neither will you.”
“I’m going to do it, Nimr. I have to. We have to. We said we would. It’s the right thing to do. We have to do it for Palestine.”
I spent the next two days trying to talk Rami out of it. I didn’t believe Ghassan and Tarik would kill us for refusing to kill ourselves. That was absurd. I talked Rami’s ear off. I was manic, in a frenzy without limits. I circled around him every second of those two days. Rami was easy, he was relaxed, he was movie-star cool. He threw his head back and cackled. I didn’t understand how Rami could be so resigned. None of it made sense to me. Why would they choose us? Didn’t these kinds of things take months to train for? How could Rami accept this as easily as he would honey on his bread or sugar in his tea? Maybe Rami hadn’t forgotten about Ghassan and Tarik. Maybe he had been readying himself for exactly this.
The third day after Ghassan and Tarik spoke to us, they caught us again walking home from school. “It’s set. Tomorrow we deliver the explosives and plans. Day after tomorrow, you execute.” And they did. It was that simple. They delivered the belts to us in blue plastic bags their mothers had probably brought home from the fruit market. Right outside my house, casual as cats, they explained how to use them, how to set them off. They detailed exactly how we should get where we needed to be, what time we should depart, what routes to take. That was it. According to Ghassan and Tarik, by this time tomorrow Rami and I and twenty or, if we were lucky, thirty Zionist enemies would be dead. Allah-hu akbar.
Sireen and I were supposed to meet in the alley that night. I wondered what she would say about all this. Her responses were as unpredictable as war. I considered telling her but decided not to. That night, everything felt exaggerated – the dark darker, the silence more silent. Sireen was exceedingly beautiful and I was exceptionally horny. I know you’re probably wondering how I could have been thinking about sex at a time like that. I remind you that I was, maybe still am, fifteen. Sex and death aren’t that different to me. Sex and death make me want to live. And sex is something I think about all the time, even here in the vast beyond. In the heightened atmosphere of that crazy midnight, I wanted more from Sireen than I had asked for in the last month and a half.
“Just a little, Sireen. Just a little.” How many boys have said that to how many hesitant girls? I was completely ordinary that night before the most extraordinary day. I wanted exactly what every other boy my age wants. What little Sireen gave me that night is all I will ever have. The same panting and pulsing I now realize every adolescent boy and girl everywhere will feel until we are extinct. There was an eternity between us that night. I thought it was the beginning. I thought there would be more to come, so I pulled up my pants and she smoothed down her skirt, and we laughed together, louder than we should have, our parents, our neighbors so close. It didn’t matter. No one was listening that night.
The next day I woke up late, close to noon. I had the house to myself. It was the weekend. My mother would have been at the market, my father at the café playing tawla with his friends, and my brothers, the two as yet unmarried and living at home, hanging out in the streets. I took the blue plastic bag and sat in my tiny corner of the garden. This time no books, no notebook. I removed the bomb from the bag as carefully as folding origami. It looked harmless, a contraption I might have put together myself for fun. Sireen was peeking through the gap in the wall. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now. Sireen watched as I handled the explosive gently, tenderly, like a lover. It had colored wires going through it. It wasn’t very big, and I wondered how much damage it could do. I thought about how to get rid of it. I could bury it somewhere. I could find someone to disarm it. I could explode it in a field. I could return it to Ghassan and Tarik, surely they would understand. I could tell my father, he would know what to do.
My finger caught on a wire. I was careless. It was the last thing Sireen would see, the last thing she would hear. An ambulance came, too late for me, but for Sireen, to try to save her eyes, her ears. A fire truck. The inevitable soldiers making demands and threatening repercussions which, uncharacteristically, never came. I was pleased to learn the operation for that afternoon was cancelled and Rami got to live a few more years. He would die of a brain hemorrhage at eighteen, a rubber bullet to the head.
Things I know now: Life is pomegranate lips. Life should not be Sireen blind and deaf. Life is moist encounters in a back alley at midnight, not boys listing guns, playing with bombs. No promises of heaven and houris. Enough. We want to see and hear everything, to dance until the sun rises with a girl in a silver dress. We want to gallop full speed ahead, the sheriffs of youth and glory. Not this darkness, this weight on my chest. Not this ending, not for us.
V
A certain light, hitting the cement platform of the drinking fountains, set hair on fire. If your hair was even the slightest bit brown, your head ended up, at a specific time of the morning, ablaze. It was the kind of light Graham Stevens captured in Atmosfields, a 1970s light that shone and blurred, stretched and curled. Light through inflated plastic, to the music of a Bach fugue. We were born into the warmth of that glow, in the year of the dog, though by the mid-1980s it was already being whittled away to the sharp, unforgiving, digital glare of the present.
Catching that light in the morning with our gossamer nets before class set the four of us free. Elsa, Rola, Sara, and me – the Musketeers plus one. We would wait for each other every day on that cement platform. Sara and I, neighbors, arrived together, usually first, then Elsa, then Rola, always last, on the coolest of the bright yellow Salmiya buses, bursting with some kind of news to tell, accompanied by laughter or tears. We would hug, slap hands, hook fingers like we hadn’t seen each other in years, every morning a fresh etch to sketch. That early light was a bag of tricks left casually untied. We were oblivious, never grabbing at the flight paraphernalia, never greedy for the tools of escape. Back then, we had our own ways to soar, to cartwheel away – flapjacking, thundersmacking – the four of us with hair on fire. When the weather began to cool, mid-October at the latest, we felt our youth in our throats. In the slats of our flat bellies, our churning hormones howled at us to kiss the boys and
make them cry, as many as we could, quickly, quickly, our glittering locks urging us on. Out of the corner of my eye: Jonas at the gate like a starfish, a seagull, a Baltic wave pounding through gilded light. In he came, and the world opened as if forever.
Bear
This will be a love story. It is set in Kuwait, but Sweden hovers in the background. Unlikely collision between desert girl and snow boy. In a small leather pouch carried every day for a year: a secret disclosed too late. This is a story of endings.
Does she write this for him? One year, five years, two decades plus pass. Time’s relentless march. Short brown hair and a red sweatshirt around her shoulders, sleeves flipped back like a scarf. In the places that count, Mina remains the same. He once wrote, fifteen years later: You’re still fourteen years old, pretty as a flower, with great expectations about life, love, and the future. As I’m writing this, I suddenly remember the kiss on the deck. Time marches and stops. Some events freeze solid and remain hidden in pockets to be taken out and fingered after five, fifteen. Even twenty.
Mina and Jonas sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Last comes love. Too late.
The kiss on the deck of a stationary ship. The kiss in an elevator. The kiss on a bus before goodbye.
A dream, lately, about another kiss photographed. A lost snapshot glimpsed between the pages of a book in a dream and the rest of the dream an attempt to locate this phantom photo between the pages of a phantom book. A desperate attempt to recover that photograph, to stop time, to capture a patch of impossible infinity.
She imagined him in Swedish snow then, and imagines him that way now. Jonas with the white kerchief tied around his neck and his striped shirt blue and white. She had wanted to untie that white around his neck. He would walk in late. Five minutes before the bell. Three minutes. One. She would be there earlier, watching the gate. Always with the lanky haloed boy. Sunshine Peder racing in and Jonas, always slower, hanging back with an indulgent smile. It was Peder who would sweep her off her eager feet, kiss her on the cheeks, her red sleeves flapping. Every morning bright kisses. But not from Jonas of the white kerchief. Did Peder know then, in October, December, January? Were Peder’s kisses Jonas’s? Peder could not resist lifting her up by the armpits. A lift, then a kiss. One too many kisses. Sunshine Peder faded to black. Jonas from the land of snow stepped forward.
What he had said to her was this: “In ten years, you will still be here. You will be married. You will have children. You will always be in this place.” Offhand, with smug certainty. She would prove him wrong. She would escape the trap. Je refuse! She had refused to stay put. To marry. To have children. But she had, more than ten years later, closer to fifteen, come back. Kicking and screaming. She had returned to take over someone else’s responsibilities. Bird feeding, heart mending, memory gathering. How could he understand? It would require too much to untangle. To understand takes time and time has passed. Five, fifteen, twenty. He would smile again, slow and indulgent. In ten years, you will still be here. You will always be here. But there are no children and always is a long time. Never too late. Too late for Jonas and Mina sitting in a tree.
She couldn’t understand his skin, his floppy brown hair, his gray-blue eyes, light brown eyes, hazel green. His skin more vibrant and darker than a snow Swede’s should have been; his hair not blond enough; his downward-curving eyes, color now forgotten, more sad. But maybe her own sadness was there, not his. He was happy and floppy. A singing Swede. Drinking and taking in the dizzying Arabian sun. It didn’t belong to him. It wasn’t his trap. A one-year reprieve from snow. But there was brooding in those downward eyes, she was sure. A young man’s passion and arrogance and irony and, in droplets, his insecurity, piercing the way only a young man’s could. It disappears soon enough, replaced with a sticky, eye-rolling confidence. It goes away, the young man’s feminine beauty.
She thinks they officially met after she already loved him, waiting for him to walk through the gates. Maybe it was the contrast to Peder’s ebullience. Maybe they were in a class together. Maybe it was because he carried little things in his pockets, mysteries he would take out once in a while, look over, then put away. He kept a little black notebook. Once they were friends he let her peek in. It took many months for him to show her. Inside it he wrote in tiny script, baby ants across a shrunken page. The marginal illuminations were tiny too. Persian miniatures in watercolor. Smaller than a postage stamp, the size of painted rice. An artist, it seemed, so more broody, less floppy. She loved him before the notebook, probably. But that notebook clinched it.
She had forgotten about the bank, about the island escape. He loved her, in other words, in other worlds. He reminded her later, after five, ten, fifteen. They had agreed to rob a bank together, to escape to an island. Sea and sand and time to love. To seek solace in a cliché as only young lovers can. They were never lovers. It was far too early for that; he knew better than she. Both too early and already too late. Clichés become a lifeline. The island with its sand, sun, and breeze, its hammock and unfolding future. “Maybe we could rob a bank together. Maybe you will leave this place after all. Maybe I will take you to an island in the sun.” Secrets in a small leather pouch and on islands that still, to this day, intrigue. The mystery of the leather pouch she knew all along.
It was in his pocket with the notebook, the other objects. Out it would come. The leather pouch fingered gently. “What’s in the pouch, Jonas?” The downward curve, the vibrant skin. “What’s in the pouch?” The Cheshire Cat smile looking up or down. It happened maybe once a week. Sometimes he would be sitting, other times standing. But the fingering, gentle, tender, that was the same. And the same question, “What’s in the pouch, Jonas?” The Cheshire Cat smile till she had had just about enough and would throw water at him from the fountain or run away for him to run after her, into the playground like the kids they no longer were but still, sometimes, wanted to be, into the darkened locker room that one time.
The bite on the arm was an act of love. The bruise left behind an insignia of faith. Of that she was oblivious then. Then, it was a chase during lunch. Rushing into the boys’ locker room where they were not supposed to go. The space dark like a hotel room. They were still panting, still laughing and tumbling, but they knew they had arrived at a moment. The stillness of a vortex point. Still panting but not laughing, looking up into downward eyes and looking down into what exactly? Did she have her arms around his neck without the white kerchief that day? Did he put his arms around her waist? Did he lift her and kiss her? She must have been wearing short sleeves. How exactly did his head bend down, then down some more, lower than she would have thought, past lips and chin and neck and shoulder? Did he kiss her first? A kiss on a bare arm in a white uniform shirt? Dark and silent, with kids laughing outside, running around the playground, throwing water from the fountain, giving chase to boys. Boys catch girls. Three, two, one. You’re it. Did he lift her chin up with his artist’s fingers? Their first silence. No panting, just breathing or holding breath. Four, five. The bell about to ring. Then the coil sprang. His head, lower than she would have thought, his mouth closing in, his teeth biting down hard on the flesh of her arm. She screamed and splintered the hush. This time he ran. She stayed and looked down at the strange sign of his love. She rubbed his saliva into her skin and, for the next week, wore the badge of his teeth marks with pride. Phantom kiss.
February, March, and she kissed others in sand and ice, in hidden stairwells. She knew he had a girlfriend, maybe two or three. She still would wait, heart pounding, for him to walk through the gates, but she would leave before he could approach. Maybe there were other moments. Maybe they sat together during algebra. Maybe they walked to class together. She remembers him tripping on steps once on the way to class and herself laughing at this unexpected interruption. That fall was a gift to her – his vulnerability, his shyness afterwards, his body splayed like a pinned insect. A long dancer’s body with artist’s fingers. She laughed but he didn’t, which made her remember
he was a kid after all. Eighteen is still a kid. Maybe it was then, February, March, that they stopped running, that they became friends.
It seemed invisible for months, March, April. It might have had something to do with the warming weather. The sun and sand and smell of freedom and fun and not being bogged down with the weight of love bites or loaded clichés. Lifting does not belong to blue spring days. She in her world. New Wave and boys and a love affair with the beach. Sun-baked pleasure with the girls, laughing together in the sand and sea. Waves of the blue-green Gulf. Unfurling together at the Sea Club. An island escape. She would not conform. A bikini is a weapon. Je refuse! In the Arab world, a bikini is a slap in the face, a stare down, a face-off, a go to hell in a hand basket. She learned then to wear her body without shame. Look at me. You are invisible. Laughing with the girls in waves and kissing the boys they decided were pretty enough to kiss in the breeze. Count them: one, two, three.
She in her world.
