Nasreddine — Abul-Abd — greets me warmly as he takes his shoes off at the end of the hallway. He begins to apologize for the way the years have treated him. ‘I’m all messed up, cousin. As you can see, everything is either worn out or broken down.’
‘As long as your odometer is still working, Abul-Abd, that’s all that matters, right?’
Everyone laughs as he replies: ‘That’s the problem, cousin — the odometer is as busted as the motor!’ I pull my hand from my mother’s, and jump up to embrace Nasred-dine. As we hug, we begin to cry. We continue to weep and embrace one another. As a youth, this man never wept — but now he does. He lightens our mood by recalling something we did as children, ‘Remember Grandpa’s goat, Walid? Remember when we took him out to graze in Beit Lahia forest and he ran away from us?’
He laughs and so do I, amidst all our tears. And suddenly I can see him again, the young man who used to carry his grandfather’s goat across his shoulders like it was a kitten.
The sitting room begins to fill with well-wishers, with relatives I am meeting again after so many years, relatives who have grown up and whose faces I can no longer recognize. And relatives born long after I left — children of the occupation.
‘Why were you so late, Abu Fadi? We kept getting ready to come over, but they’d call to tell us you still hadn’t got here.’
‘I got there at 9, but the crossing was closed. They said they caught a girl who was about to blow herself up.’
‘Yeah. We saw it on TV,’ my cousin Khaled interjects, then adds: ‘As soon as the girl walked into the place where they do body cavity searches, they called out to her by name, “Take off your belt, Fida, and walk two steps forward.” Her name’s Fida al-Puss. The television said that she tried to detonate the explosive, but something malfunctioned. Then the soldiers grabbed her and now she’s being detained.’
My cousin Abdel-Halim adds, ‘Did you know, cousin — Fida al-Puss was the very last cat left in the Gaza Strip.’
Everyone around me bursts into laughter at the joke, but I sit there dumbfounded. Abdel-Halim tries to explain: ‘Not so long ago, the PA launched an anti-rat campaign in Gaza. They put out packets of rat poison everywhere. The pussycats devoured the stuff and died. The rats didn’t touch it — and now there are probably more rats than people here. And since the PA had its brilliant idea, there are no cats to catch them.’
‘Sometimes curiosity really does kill the cat,’ I reply, and everyone laughs.
Another relative joins in the conversation. ‘Last week, a Palestinian from the West Bank came to visit his family in Gaza. The Israelis searched him at the crossing and found that he was carrying a kitten on his body. They took the animal away and warned the man: smuggling is strictly prohibited.’
As we laugh again, my cousin Abu Hatem walks in. Back when he was nine years old, I would send him out to buy Rothmans’ cigarettes for me. I would bribe him with a penny or a falafel sandwich. Now the man is tall — much taller than I am. Here he stands before my eyes. For a while he says nothing, though on his lips plays a bright smile meant specially for me. Meanwhile, all eyes are on us — he and I were the closest of all to one another. In an instant, I am on my feet. I stand there staring in disbelief — that little boy is now a distinguished-looking man in his fifties. He is as handsome and neat as his father was. We rush to embrace each other, shouting.
They make space for him and he sits down by my side. Before he has finished drying his tears, he bellows: ‘What did I miss? What were you talking about before I got here?’
‘We were talking about the al-Puss girl who held me up at the crossing.’
‘Hey — let’s just be grateful she didn’t blow herself up, otherwise we wouldn’t have seen you at all today. Welcome, cousin — glad to see you safe and sound.’
As we talk, one of my relatives hands me a small piece of paper and whispers: ‘This is the public statement that the girl’s family issued.’
I snatch the paper from his hand. What I read is astounding and infuriating. It also makes me want to cry all over again. In the statement, Fida’s family named the organizations that sent their daughter to do it, and they also explained that their daughter is mentally ill and prone to suicide attempts. They said that the Israelis had made arrangements for their daughter to be treated at a hospital in Israel. Because of this, Fida had papers that allowed her to go through the Erez crossing regularly. When they discovered this, Hamas and Fatah wanted to exploit it. The family said that the Israelis had been kinder to their daughter than the people who had tried to use her today.
I fold up the paper and go to the room that Abdelfettah showed me. The room is all prepared for me — my cousins have even delivered my suitcase there. I slip the statement into my backpack as quickly as possible, then go back to sit with the others. One of them speaks up and surprises me by telling me something even worse than what I just read. ‘You know, it was one of your cousins who sent Fida to blow herself up at the crossing.’
‘One of my cousins?’
‘Yes — Hussein al-Hajj Khalil Dahman. Hussein is in the al-Aqsa Brigades. He’s the one in charge of coordinating operations with Hamas. And people are already saying that this was a joint action between them.’
I had never before heard of a Dahman picking up a weapon. Never heard of one of us killing someone. None of us ever joined the military back during Egyptian rule. None of us ever joined the Palestinian liberation army either. Yet now I begin to hear that fourteen Dahmans gave their lives during the Second Intifada. And now the Dahmans have taken up arms. Some of us even staged an armed demonstration in front of the Legislative Council, demanding that a certain execution order be carried out. That has to do with the story of how my cousin Hussein’s brother, Hani, was murdered by a fellow officer in the Preventive Security Force where Hani worked. Dahmans staged another demonstration, demanding that the PA investigate the assassination of Yasser Dahman who taught at the Islamic University. He was killed by an explosive that had been placed in his office at the university, and the family wanted the killers to be brought to justice. I learn that Abu Ahmad, my mother’s cousin, lost his oldest son three years ago. The ten-year-old boy was playing with other kids when he was run over by an Israeli tank.
I go to sleep at about 2 in the morning. I have not been asleep for more than an hour when I am woken by the sounds of dozens of muezzins. Their calls clash and jumble over one another, like a band of musicians warming up before a concert. I mutter to myself and try to go back to sleep. But not half an hour goes by when the calls begin again, now even louder and more cacophonous. It is as if these are not real muezzins, but trainees who have been told to practise all night long. What the hell? Are Gazans now required to perform dawn prayers twice?
Later the next evening, I pose this question to my cousin, sheikh Sobhi, who is an imam steeped in all things Islamic. He answers in the classical Arabic that he believes raises his stature in the eyes of others: ‘What thou heardst at the outset was the invitation to rise. This was not the call to prayer that thou knowst well, but rather an invitation to rise and prepare for the call. And he who wouldst go forth to pray, let him to the mosque nearest his abode.’
‘What? At 3 in the morning? So when do people sleep?’
‘The call that follows is the call to prayer proper.’
But in fact, with so many muezzins, the space between ‘the invitation’ and ‘the call’ gets filled with recitations and prayers. There is literally no audible space — no silence — between the two.
Just before sunrise, I almost get back to sleep when I am roused again, this time by a rooster. The last time I heard a cock crow was years ago — and that was in an old Egyptian soap opera. My eyes open and I can do nothing but laugh. The crow of a live — not prerecorded — rooster is simply amazing to hear. The bird’s swagger is so beautiful and melodious, he is the perfect metaphor for the kind of leaders Palestinians have enjoyed over the years. I imagine the rooster stretching out his body as tall as he can, spreading out his legs, proudly filling himself up with breath, as if air was a spirit that filled his insides to their utmost. He extends his wings and feathers as widely as possible, till his body is bigger than its actual size. Then he unfurls his tail feathers like a peacock strutting over a field of competitors. He raises his head, and his bright red comb goes stiff like a royal crown. And he stays there like that until he decides that the time to rise is at hand and then, for the sake of every hen within earshot, he belts out his warning against those who would still sleep.