Salt Air
“He studied the sea, as if sizing up an enemy.”
APRIL 15, 2025
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This short story was originally written in French around 2016 and published in 2017. It engages, in part, with the aftermath of Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza — Operation Protective Edge — though it never explicitly names it. The story also explores the characters’ inability to see Gaza. They keep turning it into something else, collapsing the geographies of Gaza into a single, singular place — perhaps in an attempt to make sense of what it means to them, and the meanings others impose on it. Of course, read in 2025, as Israel renews with brutality its assault on the ruins of Gaza, the story has a different resonance. The character’s description of Gaza as a “riviera” also takes on a new weight. I invite the reader to keep in mind the date of the story’s writing, and perhaps also to reflect on what these echoes suggest about what we are witnessing in Gaza today.
He didn’t say anything on the road from Ramallah to Gaza. As we crossed the military checkpoint, he didn’t open his mouth. He showed his passport, his permit, his ID card, his other passport, his other permit. He was asked why he’d come. The project manager, a paunchy Jerusalem man, answered for him. We’re all together, we’ve got all the papers we need to go into Gaza. The soldier waved us through with one hand as the other held a rifle steady. He stayed silent while we drove through the city to the hotel, not even looking out the window, just fiddling around on his phone. Photos of us in Taybeh, Jenin, Sebastia. At the front desk, he watched me, speechless. Only once we were in our room with the door shut behind us did he speak. He went out on the balcony, leaned over the railing. His eyes came to rest on the horizon. He lit a cigarette, smoked the whole thing. He crushed the butt in an orange ashtray and turned to me. “It’s this beach, just across, you know.” Four kids. In this postcard-perfect setting. Just across from this Mediterranean hotel where people were speaking all the languages of all the world’s news channels. Within several paces of the room where the British journalist was babbling on her cell phone, relieved she could finally plug it in. Within reach of a Norwegian NGO employee trying to write an email in Farsi on his Mac in the lobby. Within earshot of the French man sent by one of his country’s radio stations who was kicking up a fuss over the cost of the Wi-Fi to the befuddled receptionist — first in broken Arabic, then in the English that only the French speak, and finally in French — before storming back to his room in a huff. Within a few paltry meters of the apple-cheeked Palestinian man surveying the sea from his chair on the blue Hebron-tiled terrace.
He noticed my worry as I watched him and said: “Don’t you start thinking that this might be some fateful moment for me.” He felt at ease here; his sense of decency had come in a rush. My solicitude irked him.
Hotels deferred disaster, flattened out space. We could just as easily have been in a loft on the thirtieth floor of a steel tower in Tel Aviv.
According to a little brochure at the front desk, the hotel was inspired by caravansaries. The architect, a Gazan trained in Jordan, had hoped to mold Andalusian reverie to Levantine luxury. As he made his way back over the Allenby Bridge from Amman, the brochure continued even as its use of the second person plural felt increasingly insolent to me, the architect conjured up the splendid hotel in which you find yourselves. While we waited for our room, I tried to imagine being this architect as he crossed the structure spanning the banks of the Jordan, that filthy swamp caught between two palm trees. Crushed by the heat and beset by flies. Similarly exhausted after a convoluted trip. Thinking: Actually, Gaza could rival Alexandria. And so he sets to transforming his hometown into a bustling, sophisticated Mediterranean trading port. As if buildings could stave off disaster. So the hotel is outside time, both archaic and ultramodern: Ottoman vaults and Bauhaus terraces — the architect dreamed up all these possibilities, conjured up oceans. We were led through endless corridors of heavy burgundy curtains and crimson rugs to our room: It was sophisticated, conceived as a series of perfect forms that led the eye unwaveringly to the water. It was like stepping into a painting in which even the sea was framed. From one angle, it felt like being trapped in a bunker. From another, like settling in Miami.
The development agency we worked for had just had its budget slashed. So we were sharing a bedroom. That was fine with us. The porter set down our bags. They were practically empty. He shut the door behind him. We waited a moment. Then, he kissed me.
The sea was very blue. Our room’s walls were also very blue, verging on Klein blue. Our balcony overlooked the beach. The bed, barely a full, was very white. It was the same bed as in every hotel in the world. There was a minibar. There were envelopes and a notepad and a pencil bearing the hotel’s name. There was everything that could be found in every hotel in the world. This felt reassuring. Hotels deferred disaster, flattened out space. We could just as easily have been in a loft on the thirtieth floor of a steel tower in Tel Aviv.
I lay down on the bed. He took a shower. Even from the bed, I could see the sea. It was truly blue. I’d never seen the sea in Palestine. We were at thirty-one degrees, twenty-six minutes, and thirty-five seconds north latitude and thirty-four degrees, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds east longitude. Outside, it was thirty-eight degrees Celsius in the shade. In the room, it was twenty-three degrees Celsius. The exact temperature to which I like to set hotel air-conditioners. It was noon. I shut my eyes. Outside, the Caribbean; inside, the Arctic. We were nowhere, and here least of all. I heard the shower running and him singing “El helwa di . . .” Egypt indeed was only a few kilometers away. I tried to map out a route on my phone. It wasn’t working.
your mother says no don’t speak your language, not here, speak the languages you’re taught at school, forget the hoarse language of memories, no, you shouldn’t have memories at all, because I want you to live. She repeats it to you at the barrier that you’re crossing before sunup to go down their streets, our streets. She whispers it to you in their pharmacies and their hospitals and their supermarkets. On the way to school, she gently reminds you, hush, none of this, none of these words or this accent
A knock came at the door. I’d ordered some mezze. The server carefully set down the plates, bowing and scraping. He wanted to do his job well. His boss must have ingrained in him the European motions that he was performing unthinkingly. I handed him a few bills. I noticed his filthy, tattered sneakers. He took us for foreigners who had learned Arabic. He was obliging but indifferent.
He studied the sea, as if sizing up an enemy. I thought I would be afraid in Gaza but I felt no fear. Collapse was elsewhere.
The dishes were just like in Ramallah. I had been expecting the hummus to be different, salted by sea air, by devastation. The salads were a riot of color. The typically bottle-green tabbouleh had taken on a hue that could be called tropical. The Turkish salad — a familiar and generally reddish blend of onions and tomatoes — blazed. Even the succession of bland, indistinguishable salads drowning in tahini burst with copper tones. And pride of place went to the ample plate of industrial mayonnaise, a mimosa-hued sun around which the banquet revolved, accompanied by a tower of unidentifiable fried fish. That seemed like a begrudging addition, to remind us that we were, despite it all, by the sea. The smorgasbord was set out across the small blue- and white-tiled marble table on the balcony. Colors were brighter in Gaza. From the city, they had flowed onto our terrace. I slathered some mayonnaise on a bit of fried fish. He was sitting on the bed, a towel around his waist, a cigarette in his hand. The ashtray lay on the ground by his feet. The way I ate surprised him. “You eat your fish with mayonnaise?” It was a question, but it was peremptory, borne by his soft, halting voice. He’d never been able to roll his rs. He couldn’t say my name right. But he did know how fish was eaten here.
He studied the sea, as if sizing up an enemy. I thought I would be afraid in Gaza but I felt no fear. Collapse was elsewhere.
I don’t know how to teach you to survive in your language so I’ll teach you the others, you can use them like disguises, you’ll be camouflaged everywhere, safe everywhere from the death that men inflict on men. You’ll be at home nowhere but that’s all right, that’s the price of surviving. Better to live than to talk. I love you in this language, but it has to be our little secret. As for the rest, when you’re in their home, speak elsewhere
I went back to the bed. I lay down on the very white comforter. The bay window’s very white curtains fluttered in the wind. The window and the curtains framed the sea; he eyed it warily. The few Coca-Cola-red umbrellas and the women sitting on the beach, draped in mauve and granite and ebony, intensified the room’s blue and white. “When I was little, I used to come to this beach. I didn’t do much with my days, you know . . .” he said as he lit his third cigarette. He finished it quickly and came over.
out there, my son, are men who track which languages people speak, that’s something mothers quickly come to learn, they’re often tracked. I’ll teach you how to cover your tracks
We hadn’t left the bed. He was dozing and I was caught up in my phone screen, I glanced at it, I glanced at the sea, not entirely sure where to rest my eyes. The sun had set. The moon, on this first night of the weekend, was full. From the balcony, I heard the ebb and the flow of the sea belching tiny white spiders onto the shore. The moon was so bright as to be a projector. I put on some music on my computer and lowered the volume. I looked in vain for something befitting of the moment, an elaborate, ethereal melody. I dwelled on those two adjectives. I went out on the terrace. It had been usurped by silence. In the distance, the sea quivered.
It was true we had nothing in particular to do. Our visit here was a sham. Accounting had told our director that the department needed to max out expenses before year-end to justify the budget and qualify for full funding again.
We drank coffee on the balcony. All we did was to go from bed to balcony, from balcony to bed. Our room had the ambiance of a spring afternoon: all the windows wide open. He told me that his uncle had drowned on this beach, long long ago, when he was still a child in Gaza. It was explained to him that a ghoul had dragged his uncle to the bottom of the sea. Or maybe a mermaid, he couldn’t remember. He asked me if I’d been told about ghouls when I was little. Yes, they live like hermits in the Dead Sea cliffs. They gobble up children who wade too deep into the salt water. What do your ghouls look like? They’re gray, their eyes bulge, they have just a few long hairs and a rotting scalp. They’re all naked but their bodies don’t look one bit human. The sea salt’s eaten away at them. They can’t stop scratching their skin. They eat children, they’re messy eaters, baby brains trickling down their jowls, down their festering bodies. What about yours? Mine are pretty and wear very white dresses and they dance on the Gaza beaches. They don’t eat anyone, they just drag their prey into manic dances all the way to the abyss. As ways of killing go, it’s a pleasant one; much nicer than among my kind. I’d trade my sea for yours. I do like how the sea, with the moon shining on it like that, looks solid. It’s a dance floor! Shall we dance? The suggestion caught me off-guard: he was usually so restrained. At the agency, everyone always tried to outdo each other with swagger, ideas, jokes. At one point, fed up, he whispered that the Arabs were all hot air; they would pontificate and speechify and never actually do anything. In Arabic, they say tuqq hanaq, clacking their jaw. My ghouls clack their jaw as they eat children. His seriousness was endearing.
you won’t lose anything. Speak nimbleness, speak the light-language, listen, it has so many major figures; we have nobody, we’ll be a dead language should we not be plentiful should we not multiply, yes, speak the languages of life, they are numerous and right at hand, living language one, living language two, living language three; don’t choose dead language one, death-language one
The next morning, we were planning to go down to the restaurant, to escape the room’s stifling air, to make small talk with the other guests or our colleagues. To pretend that we were there for work. To type at our keyboards, make a few calls, argue vehemently with pretend interlocutors on the other end of the line. A well-orchestrated production of productivity that we would pull off brilliantly. “Just imagine them all right now in the breakfast nook,” he said, exhausted by the very thought. The French journalist, recovered from the fuss, flirting a bit with the British woman as they both got some labneh from the buffet. Him commenting on the buffet’s meager offerings. Her thinking that the French really are tightarses. The Palestinian waiter thinking the same thing. The Frenchman trying to wow an NGO staffer after that, unaware that she’s been in the region for ten years now and seen so many men like him show up inflated with self-confidence only to start smoking, get fat, find out that the inevitable crow’s feet and dark circles spread across faces far quicker here than elsewhere, and leave punctured by self-doubt. “What makes them all think they’re so special?” he asked me. “They’re all the same, and for thirty years now we’ve seen them all come, hopeful, with big egos, only to leave, to go back home to their Albion or Gaul and die. I’d rather stay in the room with you than see more of that. Forget them. We’re on vacation. A romantic weekend.”
It was true we had nothing in particular to do. Our visit here was a sham. Accounting had told our director that the department needed to max out expenses before year-end to justify the budget and qualify for full funding again. A mission in Gaza would be our silver bullet: It was a big line item and looked great on our annual report. We were picked to come along; foreign teams always had Arab chaperones. “Ooh, we’re a cost of business,” he quipped to me before pouncing on the chance to see Gaza again. The agency had been started in the early 2000s, along with all the other organizations overrunning Ramallah. From the hilltops of the near-capital, the NGOs and other outfits of every stripe were charting the horizon of a bright future, a land of financial potential. What a thrill it would be for a State to be inaugurated in the new millennium! It was hard to explain to our families fretting about our prospects what exactly we were doing: We in fact weren’t doing much, apart from lining the pockets of both the foreign employees who’d washed up here and ourselves, Palestinians become merchants at the temple. We worked for next to nothing in a dud country. But the agency brought plenty of benefits, since all its haphazard activity and productive futility enabled it to grow more and more powerful. It was unbelievable how effortlessly it showered us with travel and vehicle permits, invitations to expats’ cocktail parties. With the agency, our days were less complicated, our lives sweeter.
He hadn’t been to Gaza in fifteen years. I wanted to see it too. I’d forgotten that I’d been there a few times already. I had to commit this violence upon myself again, rediscover Gaza, accept the existence of this strip of land only a few kilometers from the village where I’d been born and yet already on another continent. If not for that, he and I would have remained speechless, doomed to know each other only in part. As I lay beside him, I looked at the sea, he looked at the ceiling. He told me about his childhood in this city.
I told him that I liked smelling the salt air from the sea. His retort was blunt: “That isn’t anything. Salt has no scent. What you smell is decomposing algae.”
“I never wanted to leave Gaza. Here, I feel right, you know? Here, I’ve always felt right. Even now, here, I feel just right.” In this place, he could look at me calmly for the first time since we’d met. “It’s like I’m meeting you properly at last.” He said my name, without rolling the r. I smelled the salty sea air, the devastation.
He lit another cigarette. The ashtray was filling up little by little, each new butt another step in our intimacy. Nobody came to clean the room. I wallowed in disappointment: that was my favorite thing about hotels. In them, acts are inconsequential, hygiene is unrelenting, entropy is nonexistent.
I was overcome by disgust. I wished we were in Europe. In Geneva, on the lake. We’d be in a room just like this one, maybe salmon or lilac, and rather than the Mediterranean, and this Gaza masquerading as a French Riviera beamed to the edges of Africa, we’d have a view of a shimmering Mont Blanc. The scent permeating our Swiss inn would have been rain-soaked, no longer bitter like sea air, nor undercut by the sickly-sweet heat of high summer.
On the promenade, two young women in white dresses were taking a stroll. Their hair rippled beneath their white beribboned hats, and, in the sun, they seemed like wisps. They sauntered, savoring the smells of the sea. At the breeze’s touch, their bodies slackened. Their radiant indolence brought me back to mine, enclosed. I stretched my limbs. I felt the sun’s heat on my bare skin. It had no effect. They walked along the sea, parasols open to protect themselves from the harsh rays. They stopped at the ice-cream cart, a wheeled contraption with the pastel hues of European shores. They oohed and aahed over the opalescent flavors, wavered and, having perhaps decided to wait for the lavish lunch in store for them, did not buy any. It was the day and time for families to gather. They walked past a man who sat as if tied down and smoked a pipe. The sweetish smell of his tobacco, mixed with that of the sea, poured into our room, which reeked of cold tobacco. The women soon disappeared from my field of view.
I told him that I liked smelling the salt air from the sea. His retort was blunt: “That isn’t anything. Salt has no scent. What you smell is decomposing algae.”
In our room, on the white bed like the beds in every hotel, leaning on our elbows at the balcony table overlooking the sea, we were eking out, in a bit of a daze, our final hours together. I wondered if he knew it.
He’d asked questions nonstop for the past few months. He wanted to know if I remembered every last detail of the day my parents told me that we were leaving. How old had I been? Five? Did I remember the airport, the day we departed? The throat-drying cabin air? He wanted to know what I retained of my first few years in Washington, D.C., my specific memories of the apartment where we’d been, the fresh-paint fumes, the way I’d been slowly taught to not use particular words, to pronounce other ones differently. My return visits were also of great interest. My first return visit, my second, my six return visits over the course of my life. He wanted the specifics of each one. Airlines, flights, stopovers, drives, sleeping in my childhood bed again for the first time. He wanted to know precisely how I’d experienced each conflagration of my existence. What was Jerusalem like the first time? The second? What about the tenth time, what was Jerusalem like for you? One day, we kissed in a city alleyway, sitting on some steps, in broad daylight. It was his first time in Jerusalem. He was stunned. Never in my life had I ever done anything so shocking. I can still taste it in my mouth, even as I sit continents away from Jerusalem.
In the hotel room, he didn’t ask any more questions. It was his turn now to tell me things. He’d played hooky at times. It wasn’t easy. The schoolteachers stood on watch wielding huge rulers like rifles in their hands, more alert even than soldiers. If he was caught, corporal punishment was certain, even at fifteen. He went to the sea, always to the sea. He ate chips while watching the waves. He liked to imagine the mermaids’ kingdoms, and their underwater prisons that held his uncle. Do you know how to say mermaid in Arabic? It’s a rather peculiar word . . . After he left, what he missed most was the sea. When we met, he said, I knew I’d come back to this beach with you. I told him that it was more like a volcano here.
people of our language are dying; but in their languages, nobody dies. You won’t lose anything, I promise you. Our language is heavy and devastated. It won’t go into meltdown. Their languages are like costumes, you can use one, shrug it off, borrow another. You can go as a prince or a rabbit or Batman, you can wear military camouflage, you can be whatever you want to be. Their languages are full of light, you’ll see, I promise you. They will defer to you and set you free. Ours is an anchor weighing us down. You’ll drown. Can’t you hear, in its sounds, the laughing, rotting carcass? The ghoul on the lookout? The wide sea in free fall?
The hotel was a vacation, a reprieve. Gaza needed to be an unknown in our equation, a distant realm. It needed to be possible to imagine it at times as his home, at times as the Milky Way, at times as the land of dead algae and devastation. Now that we’d come, now that Gaza was no longer home nor graveyard of algae, silence had to flood the space between my body and his with twinkling stars. In our room, on the white bed like the beds in every hotel, leaning on our elbows at the balcony table overlooking the sea, we were eking out, in a bit of a daze, our final hours together. I wondered if he knew it. He had to have seen that the arc connecting us had suddenly become a straight line. We had come, we had seen the volcano at its exact geographical coordinates. We had seen the molten lava in its maw. I had seen the wide sea in free fall.
It was our final night in Gaza: He couldn’t stop talking, he was tossing and turning, he was pressing up against me. He was quibbling, asking himself questions and telling me yet more minor details that came to mind. The ice-cream man on the pier. The spice man, his Israeli chips, the seasoning so messy that it got all over one’s sneakers, the way sand did. The harbor that could rival Alexandria. The blonde women bursting into laughter on the beach. The time he found a statuette in the water. The days when he felt like imagining he lived in Cairo, not Gaza. The mermaids that called to him at times. The ghouls on the lookout, clad in their finest dresses. He told me everything; he didn’t want to leave the least bit of confusion between us.
The receptionist had proudly informed us that the Israeli army knew the hotel’s exact geographical coordinates. He’d said, in English, both so we’d know and so all the guests wouldn’t forget: “We’ll never get bombed. Expats sleep here when they come to Gaza, they wouldn’t risk it.”
He would have liked to go outside, walk down the streets, maybe see familiar faces. Outside was algae, wind, waves; outside, the open sea beckoning.
I gave up on sleeping that night. I saw the moon rise above the sea. From the balcony, I noticed the young women again. They were heading back the way they’d come this morning. They’d traded their beribboned hats for cocktail dresses — one cobalt, the other vermilion. To my right, the casino they were headed for, a radiant seashell, gleamed in the darkness.
one day language was given to me. It’s true, Mama, someone gave it to me, not meaning to, unintentionally. It was far from the language’s country, very far in another country where it snowed nonstop and it was over a bowl of pasta, yes, steaming noodles with cilantro and slices of red and orange and green pepper, a word like that falling from a mouth that had been unfamiliar, a word, it was a sign, a promise
The receptionist had proudly informed us that the Israeli army knew the hotel’s exact geographical coordinates. He’d said, in English, both so we’d know and so all the guests wouldn’t forget: “We’ll never get bombed. Expats sleep here when they come to Gaza, they wouldn’t risk it.” Then, in Arabic, with meticulous diction: “We are un-touch-able.”
Maybe his name was Ari. Maybe he’d been in the army for two years already. Damn, two years! he might have thought as he woke up this morning. Two years in this shithole. He might have left his barracks to go to his post. He might have been a good-looking boy, a bit awkward, only just out of his teens. His limbs might still be unused to his new body, his arms a bit too long, his whole being somewhat gangly. He might have had acne scars on his pale skin. He might have had pretty blue eyes, big and distant. Perhaps he wasn’t especially keen on army service. Perhaps there were times when he wanted to go AWOL, but was too scared. Besides, he’d never killed anyone. At least, not directly. Today, at his post, he would see the hotel’s coordinates. He would know not to send anything that way. Thirty-one degrees, twenty-six minutes, and thirty-five seconds north latitude and thirty-four degrees, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds east longitude.
I also appreciated that he was just as scarcely Arab as I was, even though he was from Gaza. The attraction grew slowly: To me, he was a home; to him, I was an elsewhere.
Perhaps he thought, today I’ll spare two lovers intertwined in one of that hotel’s beds, thirty-one degrees, twenty-six minutes, and thirty-five seconds north latitude and thirty-four degrees, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds east longitude, that’s where they are, spooning on the bed, looking at the sea, the one telling the other about his childhood here on the beaches of Gaza City, that’s where they are and maybe they do love each other, thirty-one degrees, twenty-six minutes, and thirty-five seconds north latitude and thirty-four degrees, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds east longitude are the coordinates of their love.
and then he came back from the restaurant with me, that night in the snow, and the next morning, at daybreak, we talked. The first time in my life that I truly talked, whispering, and I didn’t understand at first, I didn’t know because I heard you, Mama, telling me, as if I had no language, you’ll have only speechless languages, nothing but languages that bleed and blaze and, in broad daylight, blue
The last time I came back here, this time for good, was difficult. I didn’t recognize anything. At heart, I didn’t know anything. I’d promised myself never to come back. And there I was, back all the same. After my first, my second, my third time, I’d ended up getting a job. Ramallah became the fabric of my days. I was now showing off to my Palestinian diaspora friends, as if to say: See, this is how you go back. If I can do it, so can you. I first met him at one of the city’s cafés. He’d just come back, too, he’d made up his mind to live in Ramallah. He had an easier go of settling in. Even his body was better suited to the place. His shadow was where it ought to be on this soil. We started spending time together. Seeing each other in cafés, bars, then the agency more and more often. I liked the way he discreetly slipped into my office to chat. I liked his Arab presence among the foreigners around us. I also appreciated that he was just as scarcely Arab as I was, even though he was from Gaza. The attraction grew slowly: To me, he was a home; to him, I was an elsewhere.
he came into my home and stayed there a long time, he wasn’t from the language’s land, one day his parents had decided that they would go away, far away, where it wasn’t like them at all, maybe they went to Asia maybe to Scandinavia, I don’t remember, maybe they went to Australia, far away in any case, where the curse didn’t exist and they spoke that land’s language to their children. But the little words of love, albi, and of food too, tanjara, and for scolding, ya ibn kalb, and for healing, el wawa, those remained, without fail, in the language. Tears fell in that language as well, when his mother sobbed because back there in the land his cousin had been killed even though she’d told him leave, don’t speak that language anymore, don’t live in that land anymore, leave before you too. She sobbed for her cousin in the language, he told me it was the first time he’d seen her in this language and after that she’d hugged him tight, it was also in this language that she’d hugged him
On this beach, right there, right in front. They were playing, I watched them. There were four of them. They played three-on-one at first, then two-on-two. There was no goalie. They kicked the ball around. They shrieked like gulls. They swore. They laughed. On this beach, right there, just across. They were playing. One of them looked like him. It was hard to believe he really was from Gaza. He too had, once upon a time, been a little brat playing soccer on the beach. He must have known how to swim, he’d grown up diving for fish. He’d jumped off each of the rocks I could see. Or so I imagined, I had no idea what it was like to grow up by the sea. Yes, he must have been a good swimmer: He hadn’t drowned.
Those kids weren’t diving today, that would be dangerous. They were playing soccer, they were shrieking like gulls, Amir, Amir, over here, look, look, stupid Amir. Amir was the one who looked like him. One of them fell, he got up angrily, pounced on Amir, yelled that he’d tripped him. What language were they speaking? What exact coordinates did their bodies have?
and he like that in the morning like some scrambled eggs he’d have made just like you, Mama, he gave me back the language, it was like a proposition, he who spoke just enough of it to tell me the words that his mother said to him, and he gave them to me, he handed those words to me, like that, in the morning, as the light poured gently across the bed, he said a cooking word, as he kissed my lower back, and suddenly it was as if we were on a balcony overlooking the sea
One of the kids had gone over to the mermaids. Another had gotten a scolding because he’d eaten too many chips. The third’s body hung in tatters off a rock, an arm like driftwood on the promenade, a messed-up eye among the seashells. The last one was dancing with the ghouls.
Gaza’s neighborhoods are named after fruits and vegetables. That’s the topography of a wonderland, a flower island. Gaza was destined for tropical beauty.
then one day he stopped speaking the language too, just like that, and it was like he’d vanished, he’d gone away, he’d taken a vacation from the language. He withdrew his proposition. He once told me, amid more noodles, amid peppers of every color, in a blindingly fluorescent room, you can’t speak that language and not want to die. I want to live, so I’m stopping
In the morning, on the balcony, I ate hummus, labneh, a few olives. A less colorful tray for breakfast, but just as vibrant. He didn’t eat anything, simply nibbled unthinkingly, with his fingertips, on the za’atar. “There was an olive tree in our garden. It was all the way back in a corner we didn’t go to much. They’re sad, shabby things, olive trees, don’t you think? I remember when I was little, I swung from its branches. I didn’t think twice about the olive tree. Now I worry about it. It’s still there, though, and it’ll no doubt be there after I’m gone. I wish it wouldn’t nag at my thoughts.”
“I’ve been to Gaza before,” I told him. “One time we came, when I was little. We danced on the beach, until the sun went down! Then we went to see the couple’s house, there was an olive tree behind that house, too.” He said: “That’s a lie, nobody ever danced on the Gaza beach until the sun went down.”
Gaza’s neighborhoods are named after fruits and vegetables. That’s the topography of a wonderland, a flower island. Gaza was destined for tropical beauty. He’d lived in Miami for a bit. In Miami, it feels like the concrete just might drift away, that the least breath could scatter the city into an archipelago on the ocean. “Gaza is no different,” he said. “It should have been Caribbean.”
Mama, why were you so afraid I would die when I had my whole life ahead of me? I want to speak the language because I’m afraid, if I die, if this language kills me like you think it will, that they’ll speak in my place, that they’ll displace me crush me flatten me. They won’t be able to do that in that language, nobody can flatten it, if I speak it they’ll never speak in my place, after my death I’ll always be me. Nobody will be able to displace me nor speak for my corpse
He was still standing on the balcony. He called out to me. He pronounced my name without rolling the r. “We could be anywhere in the Mediterranean,” he said. “We had to wait to go to Gaza to have a romantic weekend together.”
He’d said: “Promise me that when I die, you’ll do everything you can to make sure I’m buried in Gaza.” I hadn’t understood what sorcery had placed this responsibility upon me just like that.
Thirty-one degrees, twenty-six minutes, and thirty-five seconds north latitude and thirty-four degrees, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds east longitude, that’s where his sleeping body is. It’s hot, I’m pressed against him. He’s sweaty. Our Caribbean. In his ear, I whisper our coordinates. Thirty-one degrees, twenty-six minutes, and thirty-five seconds north latitude and thirty-four degrees, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds east longitude, that’s the exact spot where I lean over his ear, my body against his, to tell him the last words, the ones that will close out our weekend in this verging-on-Klein-blue bedroom, between the bed and the balcony on the sea. My Caribbean. I repeat them. The precision is reassuring. We’re in a place known to every space satellite: the tattooed address of our annihilation.
why were you so afraid I would die? I took control of my death, all you have to do is be there, at that moment, to tell those who might try to tell of me, no, none of you knew him and none of you have any right, only mamas have any right to tell the story of their dead sons, don’t say, he was this, he was that, he was such-and-such. He was nothing. He was drained of language because of me, because I wanted him to live, because I myself didn’t want to be yet another a mother among so many mothers who had lost their sons, I didn’t want him to talk because I wanted it to be like in those countries of yours, I wanted to die before him. I didn’t want to be like them, bearing darkness, tearing out their hair, beating their chests
I didn’t know how to explain it to him. The two days and two nights went by thus: him talking, him sleeping, him looking at the sea and me watching him, puzzled. The mezze plates piled up. The fishbones and thyme powder lay on the balcony table. Nobody came to clean up and my head was in disarray. And I’d felt all his excitement, I’d come to understand that he would need to go far away from me. He’d said: “Promise me that when I die, you’ll do everything you can to make sure I’m buried in Gaza.” I hadn’t understood what sorcery had placed this responsibility upon me just like that. He’d allowed himself to envision a future where I’d be by his dead body, mourning it, calling military governorates, administrations, soldiers, families, so his body would be buried in Gaza. I didn’t want to be responsible for burying him there by the sea where, as a child, he’d eaten chips. Me, in black, entrusted with his bloodless body. It was time to go back to Ramallah where the air was light.
Nobody asked us about the weekend. The British woman had talked on the phone too much. The Frenchman had insisted on explanations for why he couldn’t go wherever he pleased in Gaza. He held up a finger as he told the distressed receptionist that he was good friends with the consul, that this wasn’t how things were done. The Norwegian man had managed to send that email in Farsi. And the fat Gazan was still looking at the sea.
Thirty-one degrees, twenty-six minutes, and thirty-five seconds north latitude and thirty-four degrees, twenty-one minutes, and twenty seconds east longitude: I settled the bill; he withdrew into silence. I thanked the receptionist and apologized for having left the room in such a mess.
Seated in two plastic chairs on the gravel in front of the hotel, we just barely managed to give a proper answer to the project manager who’d bluntly asked if we’d had a nice time this weekend. We waited for the car to take us back to Ramallah, where we would no longer know each other, where the smell of dead algae and graves on the seafront would not come. He lit a cigarette.
Mama, why were you so afraid that I would die when I had my whole life ahead of me? I once told you, do you remember, Mama, I want to get a word from this language tattooed on my wrist. That one, this word. It’s impossible to translate into any other language. That word. Mama, I’ll tattoo it here on my wrist where I’ll always see it and you’ll always see it too and when I’m dead because this language, Mama, this bleeding language, it’ll kill me, you know it will, that’s why you were so afraid that I would die when I was little, when they undress me if I die dressed, if my body doesn’t die exploded or burst or crushed, because in our land mothers live floored by their son’s exploded brain, when my shirt is pulled off they’ll see this word on my deathly white skin and they’ll say, yes, Mama, they’ll say, this word killed him and, Mama, you’ll still say, I tried, I still tried, when he was little I told him, don’t speak this hoarse language, speak the other languages, don’t say these words, this language will kill you, I told him when he was little, yes, this word is what killed him, yes, this word this word this word
From Préliminaires pour un verger futur (Preliminaries for a Future Orchard) by Karim Kattan © éditions Elyzad, 2017. Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman.
