The Sea Cloak Read online

  A few hours later and the Land Day celebrations are well under way. Qamar doesn’t hesitate to volunteer to speak at a large gathering of teachers and students outside the school gates. In her opening words, she improvises freely but from time to time slows down and returns to specific lines of poetry she had rehearsed for this occasion. Her science teacher, Mr Rafiq, whispers words of encouragement from behind her. ‘Hold the microphone closer, grip it properly,’ he instructs. ‘Keep going, Qamar; don’t stop.’ She nods and smiles back at the crowd, continuing. Some of the other teachers on the podium start to grow impatient.

  The time comes for her to finish with a rendition of a patriotic song. It is one her uncle taught her when she first arrived in Gaza, as one of the ‘Returned’.3 He had sung it to her under the lemon and olive trees that her grandfather planted in the camp garden.

  When she finishes, a roar of applause crashes over her. Mr Rafiq steps up and hugs her: ‘I’m so proud of you, daughter Qamar.’ He is a tall and wiry man, with a thick moustache. But he is also kind.

  As soon as she gets off the podium, the maths teacher marches up to her. ‘We need to have a talk, Qamar,’ he says sarcastically, with a hint of admiration. She nods to show that she understands and follows him to his office. Once inside, she waits for him to sit down behind his desk, but he doesn’t; he just stands in front of her and looks her up and down. ‘Qamar, when are you going to stop with this nonsense?’ He spits his words and she can feel the moisture of his rage as it hits her face. He rants, and rants and rants, but soon she can no longer hear the words, just watches his lips and teeth move silently up and down, up and down, until she cannot see him at all. When it’s over, she leaves and goes home to cry in her room.

  This was before her parents forbad her from dancing, of course. She had been taking dancing and singing lessons led by a delegation of international volunteers, called ‘Heart to Heart’. The group had come to Gaza to teach refugee children about performance and creativity.

  ‘There’s no tolerance in the community for what you’re doing, Qamar,’ her mother shouts at her later that evening. ‘It isn’t accepted here. Your father can’t handle the criticism from the people he works with, or from his cousins.’

  As her mother berates her, she drifts back to that day on the beach, when the smile on her father’s face as he watched her dance with the rest of the group couldn’t be mistaken. They had been practicing for a show that would take them around the world. The more her father smiled, the easier it was to dance like a butterfly. They thought about all the countries their performance would take them to. That smile of her father’s would never leave her just as her country never would.

  She loved these after-school groups. In music, she would watch in awe as the American teacher, Jonathan, would take turns playing the guitar one minute, the piano the next. Whenever she finished a rendition, he would tuck a strand of blond hair neatly behind his ear and remove his glasses – a sure sign that he was about to tell her off: ‘Open your mouth wider, Qamar. All the way. Don’t be embarrassed by the way it looks. The most important thing is for your voice to be heard. You want to sing about this country when you’re older, don’t you?’ She would listen to the sound of her voice as she sang – the high notes and the low ones, she would lose herself in them until there was nothing left of herself but the song.

  In dance class it was the same. Qamar loved to watch her instructor’s, Lily’s, graceful movements. She was always effortlessly elegant and, although a little old, amazingly supple. Lily’s hair style seemed a little quirky, and red like her own hair. But her eyes were as soft and soulful as a song.

  Lily would place her hand on Qamar’s back, and whisper: ‘Relax your back but keep it taut. Feel the weightlessness of your body. Bend gently forwards and picture yourself dipping your hands into a river. Feel the droplets of water glisten on your fingers in the sunlight. Feel your hands glide through the water, focus only on those droplets of water. Don’t say anything, just dance on the tip of your toes until you lose yourself.’

  Then when the exercise was over, she would tell her: ‘Now sit, close your eyes, and tell us a story from the dance.’

  She wouldn’t hesitate to do anything she was asked. That feeling of weightlessness would stay with her for years to come, the image of sunlight twinkling through the drops of water on her fingers. It took her to another place, a place where she was happy. She knew herself better there.

  ‘There’s something different about you, Qamar,’ the French woman said to her one day. ‘Are you from Gaza?’

  ‘I have just moved here from Syria.’

  ‘So you are French!’ she exclaims. ‘You must speak French?’

  Qamar was puzzled by this for a moment. ‘No, I’m an Arab. I’m Palestinian. I know a few French words, but my English is better.’

  Unprompted, Lily started to untie Qamar’s long braid and comb the hair out straight. Then she picked her up and spun her round. ‘You should loosen your hair, let it be free like you. You remind me of my daughter, Qamar... Don’t ever stop smiling, you hear me?’

  ‘Qamar, Qamar, Qamar!’ The maths teacher is shouting her name.

  ‘I’m here, sir,’ she says, back in his office, feeling his spit land on her face as he shouts.

  ‘You’re wasting your time with this nonsense! You’re better than this. There’s no such thing as a patriotic song, you know! All songs are degenerate; your only loyalty is to God, to your religion.’

  She fixes him with a long, hard look, seeing only dead eyes and an empty stare, set into a tried, sallow face.

  This episode might bring tears to her eyes, later that night in her room, but she knows she has faced worse than this. Like the time he kicked her out of class for standing up to him when he said women who called themselves ‘emancipated’ were ‘sluts’. She is proud of the restraint she showed that day, despite her anger, despite his humiliation of her, in front of the other girls. She can feel the same tears prickling her eyes as she felt then, tears she refused to shed for his ignorance. She left the classroom that day without giving him another look. ‘The God I know pays no resemblance to the monster you rant about,’ she says with a smile, and proceeded to skip all the way down the corridor and out into the courtyard of the Zeitun Preparatory School for Girls.

  Notes

  1. Land Day (30 March) – Commemorating the day in 1976 when, in response to the Israeli government’s announcement of a plan to expropriate thousands of dunams of land for state purposes, a general strike and marches were organized in Arab towns from the Galilee to the Negev. In the ensuing confrontations with the Israeli army and police, six unarmed Arab citizens were killed, and about one hundred were wounded.

  2. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

  3. As part of the Oslo Accord, many thousands of Palestinian refugees and their families, living in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon, were returned to Gaza in the late 1990s.

  The Anklet of Maioumas

  In a long, loose-fitting dress, a figure can be seen dancing between the gigantic columns of the temple. The dappled translucence of her dress blends with the marbled surface of each pillar. The dress trails behind her as she moves – a thin, diaphanous layer of fabric that traces the outline of her frame whenever it settles back around her. Both the swirl of the marble and the whorl of her dance seem to point, spiralling upwards, towards the capitals of each column, and beyond to the domed roof and the oculus at its centre. Leaves from an old olive tree can be seen matted into the girl’s hair, which fans out around her shoulders and all the way down to her lower back.

  As the figure dances, a faint, tinkling sound can be heard: an anklet, decorated with coins that dangle over the girl’s left foot. Nearby, out in the square, or somewhere beyond, a grain mill can also be heard turning and turning its wheel, as if in time to music that only the girl can hear. It picks up speed as her dancing does, spinning between the columns. The coins ring louder, glinting in the temple’s shadow
s, throwing their golden lustre upwards onto her legs.

  A third sound accompanies the tinkling of the anklet and the low hum of the basalt stone grinding the wheat: the sound of the sea. A woman with eastern features sits out in the square watching the figure in the temple whirling from column to column, as if this vision represented her destiny, not a past she’d long escaped.

  The girl revolves around one column, her right hand pointing to the ceiling above her, her left reaching down, tracing the circumference of the column’s lowest stone. To the old woman outside, it seems for a moment as if the whole column is balanced in the palm of the girl’s hands, as she spins around it. Seeing the woman looking at her, she calls out: ‘Make the mill go faster! I want to see who can spin the fastest!’

  The old woman, cloaked in a black dress with the emblem of a bird tattooed on her forehead, laughs. ‘It’s going as fast as it can. You’re too fast for it, Princess.’ The girl spins on.

  Again the sound of the sea echoes through the square, as if it’s coming from the very sky above them. As the mill wheel turns, the anklet chimes deeper and deeper, like the bell above the Maioumas town forum, announcing some imminent danger. Or the bell of a boat caught in a storm, or some vessel already drowned.

  At the foot of a mountain crawling with olive trees, a young man looks up across to the sprawling city of Jerusalem. Dressed in ragged, dusty clothes, he tries to make out the Dome of the Rock in the haze, while peeling an apple with a pocket knife. ‘Back to work. Let’s finish this thing!’ his friend shouts. ‘Break time is over.’ Forgetting his knife, the young man jumps off the rock he’s been sitting on, and sets about loading up the heavy stones needed for the foundation of a new settlement.

  Back in the coastal city of Maioumas – a city which, thousands of years later, would be discovered by archaeologists wearing diving suits and oxygen masks – the girl’s dancing intensifies. In the square outside, a man arrives with a bag of tools, followed by a large block of stone, drawn by a horse and cart flanked by two labourers. As the stone is set in place, he lifts a hammer and chisel, and makes the first blow. ‘This will be the entrance to the fortress,’ he explains to the woman in black, looking on. ‘I carved those columns over there, you know,’ he adds, pointing to the temple.

  The princess’s anklet stops tinkling. At the sound of the chisel’s tapping, she rushes to the temple’s entrance and stares at the sculptor working on the stone opposite her. The princess freezes, as if she too were one of the columns being shaped by his careful fingers. The mill wheel carries on turning. The old woman watches on with a surreptitious smile. In the silence, she feels her own sweat gathering on her skin. The sculptor is too focussed on his work to notice the noise he is making.

  ‘Slow it down!’ the princess yells to the old woman, meaning the mill. This breaks the sculptor’s concentration who turns to greet the princess. The princess approaches him, ‘Your handiwork is truly marvellous,’ she exclaims.

  He smiles at this: ‘Not as marvellous as the sculptor that made you, Princess.’ The sun beams down on her, and the sea calls her name. She runs towards it, abandoning the sculptor.

  The young man returns to his rock after a hard day’s lifting. He has the kind of muscular frame you’d expect of a builder, but his facial features are far more delicate than his co-workers’. Usually in the exhaustion that immediately follows a long day’s work, his thoughts start to wander to a fixed time and place in his memories: the image of a girl running on the beach; she was like an old Roman princess untouched by history, but given to the sea of Gaza like a precious offering. He can almost see the girl dancing before his eyes, and smell her feet on the ancient sands. He bends to pick up some soil then rubs it between his hands.

  The horse’s neigh reaches her, and she has a sudden yearning for the smell of damp, fresh hay. The princess goes to feed her horse but, as she approaches, hears the faint sound of sighs and whispers coming from a nearby stable. Slowly she steps towards it, careful not to make a sound. She glimpses through a narrow crack in the wall, and there, lying among the hay, is her sculptor. His nimble fingers move, not on a marble column, but on the ivory legs of a woman, glinting in the rays of sunlight that steal in through the cracks. His fingers move slowly and slyly like a mill wheel turning and grinding on nothing. She listens to the woman’s groans and sighs, and the sculptor’s whispers. It is the stable master’s daughter. The horse neighs nearby as if sobbing over a broken heart.

  A girl sits on an outcrop of ruined wall, half-submerged in the sands of Gaza’s beach. In a pool of tide water, trapped in one of its crevices, she has spent many hours inspecting her reflection, half pretending it was the face of an ancient princess, looking up at her through the ages. Between the rock pool and the waves out on the horizon, she has imagined the princess to be very much like her. Today, though, her eyes are itching and she finds it hard to focus: the image in the water keeps breaking up, as if the rocks themselves were shaking. The girl rouses herself suddenly, as if waking up from a nightmare.

  For the first time, she feels the sun in her eyes, and notices the edges of the wall she has been sitting on are sharp and uncomfortable. She hadn’t felt any discomfort till now. She looks at the sky and thinks how beautiful and distant it is, and gets to her feet, feeling back to her normal self again – not cramped and shrunken and hemmed in, the way she does in the narrow confines of the city. Here she is free, full size. Free to wear trousers, not a dress. Free to run in the wind, with only the sound of the ancient mill ringing in her ears. Then a café up on the promenade distracts her, with its noisy TV spewing out the day’s news, and everything comes back to her: It was an ancient mill they discovered, out on the seabed. They reported it on Al Quds TV.

  The young man returns to his perch on the slopes of Abu-Ghoneim Mountain, and gazes down, beyond a high wire-fence, at a group of Israeli men chatting to their girlfriends in the park below. This rock feels like a cage to him, and these men are like wild birds free to fly outside it, wherever they choose.

  He remembers his girlfriend’s tearful words to him: ‘When am I going to break through that border? When will they give me a permit to come and see you?’ Other voices crowd his mind, like the sound of his father’s voice: ‘You don’t have to wait for her to come. You only spent a few days in Gaza; how can you say you’re committed to her? The situation has changed, son, they have stopped letting ordinary civilians pass through Erez. Our lives and our work are here: I build the wall and you build settlements. Wake up from your daydreams, boy!’ There were the other sounds crowding his thoughts as well, sounds he wished he didn’t hear: drums and whistles, the clamour of festivities surrounding his eventual wedding to his cousin.

  The girl runs across the beach, crying. She has missed out on life, she realises. Too many years have been lost in isolation, disconnected from the world. Years wasted waiting for permission to be reunited with her lover.

  She had waited for him and felt sure that, one day, despite everything, they would be together again. But when the princess had seen her beloved sculptor in the stables in Maioumas, lying with another woman, the girl who had created her knew that the waiting must come to an end. Why wasn’t it clear to her on the land, what had become obvious out there, in the depths of the sea?

  The bars of this cage can be broken, the man decides, bending down once more to touch the soil in the shadow of his rock. Only this time, his fingers aren’t satisfied with just a handful of dirt, they scratch deeper and deeper, until they strike something hard and cold. A metal box. As he retrieves it from the soil and opens it, his throat tightens. The text imprinted along the barrel seems oddly familiar: 92 FS BERETTA. He passes it from one hand to the other for a moment, getting used to its weight. Then he takes aim. He chooses a young Israeli teenager skipping around his girlfriend in the park below, like two birds blissfully ignorant of the fact that they’re being hunted. A gunshot echoes across the valley. Then another.

  The coins on the girl’s anklet
begin to jangle loudly as she runs across the beach. The sound of the mill wheel’s relentless grinding grows louder. Grains are being scattered everywhere, she thinks. Then there is a great noise, like a crack of thunder, as the wheel comes off its axis and hits the lower floor, then another as it falls flat on its side. What a cacophony. Or is it the sound of gunfire, she thinks. The anklet continues to jangle and tinkle and ring above the wet sands of Gaza beach, but against the crashing of the waves in the distance, no one can hear it but her.

  Breastfeeding

  Farewell Party, June 2008

  Yara’s grandmother hits the ground with her cane. Dressed in a humble, peasant thobe with traditional embroidery and a white scarf covering her thick, grey hair, she looks like a messenger from an ancient world. Her fierce eyes are devoid of the tenderness you’d expect from someone looking at their granddaughter, especially one dancing so gracefully as she is now. Yara’s thin frame sways like a young, green branch, her blonde hair fanning down her back like a palm leaf. The girl is paying no attention to her surroundings, or the moment she finds herself in. Instead, she is imagining the streets and the people of Paris, and what the long journey to that distant city might entail. The grandmother, with her miserly, wrinkled face smacks the ground with her cane once more. Yara’s mother turns to look at her mother-in-law’s cane for a moment, then she looks back at her daughter, radiant as the sun at noon. Her little one has grown up so fast and here she is: a bride dancing before her, a bride dreaming of Paris.