“‘Tell Yunes his mother wants to see him before she dies. I know he doesn’t have much time, Daughter, but tell him.’”
Nahilah told Yunes, but he warned her, “Don’t bring that woman here. I’ll go and see her.”
He didn’t go, though, except when his father died, and after he’d been, his mother said it was like she hadn’t seen him.
You didn’t go, you told me, because after Ibrahim’s accident you were no longer capable of going. “How could you expect me to enter that house after Ibrahim died?”
“His mother,” you said. “His poor mother. I saw how Nahilah died and came to life again. I somehow knew he’d died; nobody told me, I swear. I heard his voice calling for help. I went and found that he was dead. After my only visit to the house, when I saw him sleeping, a special bond grew between us. You could say I started to love him, and I started to find a place in my pack for small presents. Nahilah didn’t understand at first why I insisted she dress him in the pajamas I’d stuffed into the pack. She said they were too big for him, so I asked her to shorten them, and when I explained why, she laughed. She said I was crazy, wanting my son and me to wear the same pajamas. Then she took things one step further. She started buying us the same outfits. I told her I wouldn’t wear Israeli clothes, and she said they weren’t, she sewed them herself. She said, ‘This shirt’s just like Ibrahim’s,’ and that when I wore it I looked amazingly like my son. She would make us matching clothes and say that when Ibrahim grew up we’d be like twins. I started wearing my clothes and imagining my son wearing his. She’d dress him, and then speak to him as if he were me. We became like one man divided in two, one half in the cave, the other at home.”
That was your favorite game.
Nahilah used to say that when she missed her husband, she’d dress Ibrahim in his pajamas, and that would take care of it. And Yunes would tell her that when he didn’t change his shirt for a while, it meant he was longing for her and her son. “See, the shirt’s torn and I haven’t changed it. That means I really am homesick. Plus it means you need to make us some new clothes.”
Clothes became the prime subject of the meetings of husband and wife in that cave suspended above the village of Deir al-Asad. The husband would bring cloth from Lebanon and the wife would sew it while protesting that she didn’t want to turn into a tailor, she had to take care of the unborn child growing in her belly.
“I started holding conversations with my son without realizing what I was doing. He became part of me. Even after Nahilah delivered our second son, Salem, and in spite of all the problems associated with the birth, we never forgot the clothes game.”
Yunes said he somehow knew.
“I was in Lebanon, hiding out at Nezar al-Saffouri’s house, God bless him, when I had that dream. I dreamt I saw Nahilah mourning my death. I saw myself lodged in the pit of al-Birwa, and Nahilah was standing at the edge of the pit trying to get me out, weeping. I was telling her to go back to the house, I don’t know how I was speaking because I was dead, or how I was able to see into the pit where I was, but I saw my pajamas.
“It was five in the morning and raining heavily. I got dressed and decided to go to Deir al-Asad. The dream had frightened me a lot because I had it more than once. I awoke in a panic, put on my clothes and set off. At Nezar’s house, I remembered I was seeing the dream for the third time, each time repeated detail for detail. The two times before, I’d seen it in prison and thought it was a hallucination caused by the torture, because in prison you become incapable of distinguishing between sleeping and waking. That morning I got up in a panic and heard the slosh of the rain, and I decided to go. I thought it was my father, that the old man had died and I had to go. I don’t know; when I thought of my father’s death, I felt relief, even though I’d grown to love the blind sheikh in his last days. But a father’s death comes quietly.
“Nezar al-Saffouri also awoke in a panic, tried to stop me from leaving, and said they’d kill me this time, that I’d never be able to stand the torture. I was worn out after three months in prison. I don’t know where they held me — I was in an underground vault, in darkness, damp and cold. I only saw the interrogator’s face once. The cold got into my body, and the pain, the pain of cold bones, crushed me from the inside. When cold gets into your bones, it turns you into solidified bits of agony. It was as though my skeleton had turned into shards of ice inside my body.
“You know, I used to hope I’d be beaten because it was my only way of getting a little warmth. I’d look forward to the beating huddle and rush to it. They must have noticed how I enjoyed the warmth while they were punching and kicking me, so they decided to do something different.
“I was laid out in the middle of the beating circle, with three men above me kicking every part of my body, while I rolled among their feet, unseeing. Just the boots, the boots above my cheeks and eyes. The interrogator came in, and the boots withdrew from my face. They stood me up — I couldn’t do it on my own — and one of them propped me up against the wall with his arm around my neck while the other started hitting me on my mouth with a chain wrapped around his fist, and the floodgates of pain opened. I remember the interrogator’s voice as he told me to swallow. I spat and gagged, and the man held my mouth shut with his hand to force me to swallow my shattered teeth.
“The Lebanese interrogator spoke to me in a fake Palestinian accent as though he were making fun of me, and he threatened me. Then he said they were going to let me go, and they knew everything and God help me if I tried to cross the Lebanon — Israel border again because they’d make me swallow all my teeth.
“I listened but didn’t answer. No, not because I was afraid of him, really. I just couldn’t talk without my front teeth.
“Nezar took me to a dentist, a friend of ours, who put in a temporary bridge and advised me to rest for a month before he put in a permanent one.
“Nezar didn’t ask me why I was wearing a torn shirt; his only concern was to stop me from going out. I told him I wouldn’t be long but that I had to go, and I set off. That day I was wearing the torn blue shirt I’d been wearing in the dream of the pit of al-Birwa. I found the shirt in the bottom of my pack — I’m the only man in the world who lives out of a bag: I put all that I possess in my bag, and it goes wherever I go.
“I won’t describe how I got there, because you’d never believe me. It’s true the distance between southern Lebanon and the village of Tarshiha in Galilee is short and you can do it, walking, in four or five hours, but in those days it took about twenty hours because we had to avoid the Israeli patrols. I don’t remember how, but I flew. Now, as I’m telling you the story, I see myself as though I weren’t walking — no, I swear I was moving over the ground as though I were skating, and I arrived at noon.
“I went to my cave at Bab al-Shams thinking I’d wait until evening and then go to the house, and I found her there, waiting for me.”
“You’re too late,” she said.
Yunes didn’t hear and didn’t see. Nahilah stood with her back to the entrance of the cave. The cave was dark, and the sunlight splintered against his eyes so he couldn’t see a thing. A wavering shadow appeared and what looked like bowed shoulders.
She said she’d spent the whole night waiting for him.
She said she wanted to die.
She said she had died.
And her words blended into her moans.
“She wasn’t weeping,” said Yunes. “I didn’t hear sobbing or screaming. I heard moaning like that of a wounded animal. I went to her. She shook me off and fell to the ground. Then I understood, and I started to rip up my shirt.
“She whispered, ‘Ibrahim.’ Silence and the madness of sorrow struck me, and I heard a low moaning coming from every pore of her body.