Of Nasreddine’s sons, only Shafiq was still a bachelor — and it is in the salon of his apartment that Walid’s mother spends most of her time, wallowing in her dread and apprehension. Like a statue of Buddha, she sits cross-legged on a small cotton mattress spread out on a cane mat. Her chin rests directly on her fist. It does not matter whether it is her left fist or her right, since in any case she shifts back and forth from one to the other. Her small head rests right on top, like a small watermelon perched on a bony stick, her elbow buried deep in a thick thigh. She remains like this for a long time and then, when her arms get stiff and tired, she rests them in her lap again.
In this way, Umm Walid goes on hunching over herself. Her contorted poses confirm that certain details of her frame have vanished. Six years ago, when rheumatism began to occupy and settle across her lower limbs, her legs engaged in a unilateral withdrawal. Eventually, they became little more than a horizontal projection from her lower half. Her body began to shrink into itself, as the flesh and fat slowly melted into a shapeless mound around her shanks, until finally all traces of frame and figure had been erased.
Yet Umm Walid’s body maintained a chest as wide as a threshing floor and a memory that laughed at forgetfulness. She remembers what Walid told her on the phone that morning, ‘Mama, I’m coming to Gaza to visit you.’ The words turned her world upside down.
She remembers sharing her doubts with him, ‘Are you toying with me, Walid? My boy, are you really going to come back after all these years?’ She recalls what she remembers, and still cannot believe it. It is too astonishing to believe, so she tries to call up the scene again.
‘Mama, really! I’m coming to Gaza to see you.’
‘Anything’s possible, son,’ she says — and surrenders to the wait.
When her nephews brought Umm Walid to their building about four months ago, she spent the first night at their father’s house, as custom would dictate. Ever since, Nasreddine’s sons have vied with one another to play host to their father’s aunt. They love her dearly as an aunt inherited from their father and as an adopted grandmother for their young ones. The young children’s maternal grandmothers had all disappeared some time ago, swallowed up somewhere amidst the closures, curfews, checkpoints, aerial bombardments and recurrent ground offensives — not to mention the chaos of the Palestinian Authority and the militias.
Zuhdiyya, Nasreddine’s mother and their paternal grandmother, had a stroke that left her half paralysed the day her grandson Falah was killed. Now she spends what remains of her days in a bed in a corner of her son’s apartment. This woman, who used to do all the laundry for the nine people in the family by hand, now waits, with some shame and embarrassment, for the person who will someday come to wash and say prayers over her dead body. The young children only have one real grandmother now, Ruqiyya, Nasreddine’s wife. There are fourteen of them, girls and boys; the oldest is not even six, and the youngest has yet to let out his first real scream. Since there are so many of them, the kids have little chance of getting even a hug from her.
When Umm Walid arrived it was with a warm breast broad enough to hold them all in a single loving embrace. But she changed when her legs stopped working and has now become a kind of radio whose volume and frequency are difficult to modulate. Compensating in talk and chitchat for what she has lost in terms of bipedal ambulation, nowadays she gets around mainly by way of tongue and lips and words. One day, two months after she arrived at the Nasrite Building, deluging them with informative programmes, Emad, Nasreddine’s second son, put forward the following proposal to the younger Nasrites, their wives, sons and daughters: they would implant an electronic chip in a small incision just under her tongue. The chip would help them adjust the broadcast function by remote. They could thus control the volume on their aunt in a convenient, fully civilized manner, or even turn off the torrent of words if necessary. For instance, you might want to change the channel so as to listen to Israeli bullets, aimed precisely to hit any Gazan that had the misfortune of standing in their way. (Then again, perhaps those pedestrians are the lucky ones, since at least in death they might find mercy and rest?) Or you might instead prefer to listen to the ricochets of bullets fired by true patriotic Palestinian militias, competing against one another to provide security, peace and calm? Or maybe you want to listen to something else, like the ululations of women cheering newlyweds to victory and triumph on their wedding night, as in the great conquests of times past?
But everyone began to worry about what might happen to their aunt if she were to undergo this risky surgical operation. Emad reassured them, in the smooth confident voice of a doctor in a white lab coat, ‘Medicine has come a very long way, everyone. God willing, we can also have it inserted, free of charge, in Shafa Hospital here in Gaza. For your information, I will be there personally to supervise the procedure.’
The proposal was received with a roar of laughter, and they applauded their aunt, who would become the first woman in the Gaza Strip to be operated by remote control.
Despite the relief Umm Walid felt at their welcome, she was still prisoner to feelings of exile and uprootedness. The further from home you go, the smaller you appear, she murmured to herself. When she whispered to herself, she did so in instalments because if you speak to yourself continuously and without interruption, you cannot take real pleasure in the words themselves. She knew her homelessness was of an honourable kind. For one thing, her exile was not extreme — it was like that of the people of Acre who were expelled not out of the city entirely, but only to its outskirts. In any case, age-old protocols stipulated that when marrying, a bride must move from her family’s home to the groom’s. Despite all this, she could be counted on to bring up ‘the story of her house’ at any point, as if it might dispel these awful feelings.
Umm Walid’s house was, and still is, the last thing she possesses in a world whose time is about to fold up on her. She has no husband around, nor children. The only thing that has stood by her has been this home of hers. She loves it dearly and is quite possessive about it. Whenever she is alone with her home, she talks to it, reaching her fingers to the nearest wall as if to caress the features of a beloved friend. Sometimes she stretches and leans back in the tiny sitting room. That is the only position that allows her body to stretch out fully and her eyes to wander far and wide like two skiffs lost at sea. She stares up at the slanted, rickety ceiling made of thick sheets of asbestos, and she whispers a little prayer for her house. ‘May God protect you and make you strong, just as you have protected me.’ She rolls onto her side — either side, it does not matter which — and puts her ear to the ground. She listens carefully to how the house breathes. Its breath comes and goes like the soft whisper of a breeze carrying stories from beyond the hills — or is that sound the pulsing of her heart?
She used to speak to her house all the time, complaining to it, listening to its complaints. Each night, she would dream of laying tiles across its old floor. She dreamed of painting its doors sea-blue, and its walls such a bright chalky white that on moonless nights the house would light up the entire alley. One day, she watched as her dream awoke and came true. The Nasrite boys made their aunt’s vision a reality — tiling the floor, painting the walls and its little wooden door exactly as it had been in her dream. Her house became a wedding gown. That is, until an Israeli missile threw a mourning shawl over it. The roof was thrown to the wind. Parts of the walls collapsed. Most of the sparse possessions inside went up in flames.