If the days blend into one another, it can means two things – either that you’ve settled into a painful routine, or you’ve settled in nicely to a life you never imagined you’d have. The days are sunny and easy, and you find yourself walking and wandering from place to place with songs playing in your head. Waiting for the light to change you start to hum to yourself, out of tune because you can’t quite hit the highest notes.
At these times, life is punctuated by momentous events. Births and deaths and holidays break the patterns you’ve grown comfortable with, just when you begin to notice your own comfort.
Right before the start of Ramadan, my not so new love’s aunt passed away, followed, a day later, by an uncle. The family - spread across cities, territories, countries - came to mourn. A day plus another three days without music, watching them piling in the car in the evenings to sit together in Lod and in Haifa. One aunt came from Jordan, which gave someone the idea to ask me if I could help bring another aunt from Gaza that no one had seen in eight years. At my work, we spent the three days of mourning faxing documents and faxing them again, making emphatic and then angry phone calls to the army, coordinating with men in uniform sitting in air conditioned rooms on either side of the crossing.
Finally when the mourning period was over, the army gave her permission to pass, with her daughter, and stay for three days. Four days of mourning gave way to three days of joy.
The family praised my name and all those at my organization who worked to get her in. For two days I kept my distance, nervous. My love told me how everyone came to see her, so happy after thinking that they would never get a chance to see her again and how she sat and told stories about life before the war, the family being together, being whisked away to Gaza by a new husband at just sixteen years old.
On the third day, she wanted to meet me – her nephew’s Jewish girlfriend. We came to her sister’s house, another aunt, and the family was sitting together, inside and outside, with bowls of fruit and cakes on tabletops everywhere. The aunt from Gaza sat on a chair, her hair covered by a translucent headscarf, her small hands twisted with arthritis placed in her lap. She had the same wide lips as my love and his mother. She took my hands in her hers and pulled me close, kissing the air near my cheeks over and over, saying in Arabic shukran shukran, and something about peace and other things I couldn’t understand.
Months of learning the alphabet could never have prepared me for this moment, where there was so much I wanted to say. She touched the side of her head and said something. I looked around and I couldn’t catch anyone’s attention who could help translate. It was just her and I and the distance between our two nonetheless related languages. I smiled and she smiled, and then we let go of each other’s hands.
As we walked out, another aunt called to me, everyone was quiet. She said, thank you for what you did, thank you for bringing our sister to us.
I answered back awkwardly, if only she could come every time she wanted.
On the ride home I was quiet, but once inside the house, I sobbed into my love’s arms like my life were being pulled from under me. I felt broken into a million pieces.
On my birthday, my love woke at seven and filled the house with balloons.
Today we remember easy days. Come sit with me, he says, and help me plan the garden.
1 comment:
It's so cool to hear you refer to someone as "my love." Keep doing it, and happy belated birthday...
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