Meet Me in Gaza (27 page)

‘How long have the Israelis been bombing the tunnels?’

‘For years.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘All my life.’

‘Do you ever feel safe?’

This time she shakes her head. One of the skinny kittens is sitting in her lap, rheumy-eyed and purring. She strokes it. ‘Who feels safe here in Gaza? I want to move away from this area, it is too dangerous. But my father is old and stubborn; this is his land and he refuses to leave.’ Farrah’s father also has his own corner of the yard, a tatty mattress beside a small fire of smoking twigs. He looks as though he has camped here since the day he was born.

Farrah’s mother strides across the yard with a dish of almonds. She greets Shadi enthusiastically and berates him for not having visited for too long. Then she returns to the kitchen to prepare lunch. It’s a makeshift kitchen that has been built onto the side of the house, with a roof of corrugated iron stapled over the top.

‘We used to have a kitchen inside,’ says Farrah, following my eyes. ‘But a few years ago our house was damaged by a bomb and the kitchen was ruined. So now we cook out here.’

She insists we stay for lunch and Shadi and I gladly accept. It’s a Saturday and we are in no rush. This is a welcome break from the constant demands of work. Shadi stretches, then flops down among the cushions, and for once makes no effort to check his
jawaal.

‘If you like, we can stay here all afternoon,’ he says, clearly relishing this time out.

Our lunch is a mound of rice and vegetables and fresh, homemade bread. Afterwards, Farrah and her mother pray while Shadi and I smoke. Then she offers to show me around the neighbourhood. Shadi opts for a snooze in the shade of the shelter as Farrah and I set off together.

I follow Farrah through a gap in the fence to the garden next door. Right where her neighbours’ house should stand is a crater half-filled with rubble where the building has collapsed in on itself.

‘Where are your neighbours?’ I ask, hoping they’re not dead.

‘They are OK, they left before the house was destroyed last year. Now they live there.’ She points to a domed tent in the garden, set in a small grove of olive and orange trees. As we’re talking, a woman steps out of the tent door. She is small, elderly and her face is inked with faded blue tattoos. Like Farrah her
hijab
hangs loose over her hair; her name is J’meeah.

‘
Marhaba
– You are the foreign lady who has come to visit?’

Word gets around here fast. J’meeah begins to ask me questions, but I am gazing at her inked face. Only elderly Bedouin women still bear these distinct tattoos.

‘Are you Bedouin?’ I ask, slightly hesitant.

‘We are both Bedouin,’ cries Farrah, slapping my shoulder to make her point. ‘So many of the people round here are Bedouin.’

This makes sense: the Gaza Bedouin mainly seem to live in isolated enclaves on the Strip, like here and in Siafa, and in the unvisited Bedouin camps.

J’meeah invites us in for tea, but Farrah says we are going for a stroll and we’ll see her later. As we take our leave, J’meeah says something to Farrah, making a sound like a growl or a bark. Farrah nods, and takes my arm.

‘What did she say?’ I ask as we cross the garden to the lane outside.

‘
How-How
are outside, so we have to be careful,’ she answers, jerking her chin towards the road ahead, and guiding me towards a gap in the fence.

‘
How-How
?’

Her green eyes flash. ‘The Hamas police.’

After this war, many Gazans have hardened against Hamas. Where were the fighters, people ask, when Israeli ground forces invaded the Strip? Many people mock them as cowards who hid in the other network of subterranean tunnels, up in northern Gaza.
⁵¹
As they lose popularity, the Hamas leaders become more militant, and the rank and file more heavy-handed and paranoid, especially with dissidents and outsiders, and the Bedouin are both.

Farrah and I cross into the small lane. It is lined on both sides with bombed-out and shelled houses. An occasional single wall has been left standing, or half a room. The scale of destruction is like the worst bombed-out sites in the north of Gaza. I know some of these houses were bombed back in 2005, when Israel carried out large-scale house demolitions across the district of Rafah. But here on the front line, it seems they have never stopped.

We walk for maybe an hour, through rubble-strewn streets. Farrah tells me the men in her neighbourhood spend much of their lives repairing their homes, which are badly damaged by Israeli bombs that penetrate deep into the tunnels, burying alive anyone who is inside. Meanwhile the smugglers accuse the Egyptian authorities of sealing tunnels with cement, and even pumping gas inside, to scare them off. It’s a dangerous, dirty business; dozens of Gazans have been buried alive in these tunnels. But even so, the money is a magnet that attracts new hopefuls from all across the Strip every day.

I ask Farrah what she thinks of the tunnels.

‘I don’t like them – I worry they will dig right under our house!’ she says. ‘But the siege means we cannot get aid or goods into Gaza. Israel controls it all. So they have to dig tunnels or we will have nothing.’

Personally, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration; but I get her point. Israel controls and monitors everything that enters the Strip, ensuring there is enough for life to be tolerable, but never releasing its list of what can enter the Strip, and when. Yet unpredictability ensures that people can never plan ahead. Israel dumps its surpluses here, banning all exports from Gaza. This siege is a cash cow for Israeli producers too.

I gaze over at the sprawling city of tarps, visible from everywhere we walk. Egypt is so close, we can almost smell it. I ask Farrah when she last crossed the border. She finds this question very funny.

‘I live so near! – but I have not been to Egypt for, I don’t know, maybe twenty years. And there is no chance now.’

Farrah barely moves from this area, but she asks if she can visit me in Gaza City. We agree to go to the al-Deira Hotel terrace and spend an afternoon drinking coffee overlooking the sea. She’s heard of the hotel, but never been there. Gaza City centre, with its fancy hotels, its history museum, its cultural centres and its late night cafés where men and women can sit together, is like a different land.

We eventually return to her house, to find Shadi drinking tea with her father, round his small smouldering twig fire. Farrah takes me into the family living room. She shows me great cracks warping the walls from top to bottom. Some are so wide, I can almost fit my hand inside. The cracks have made the walls tilt like drunks propping each other up.

‘The Israelis use very strong bombs to destroy the tunnels; our home trembles every time,’ she says. ‘You see, the walls are collapsing. Every house around here is like this.’

Like they are all being shaken to death.

By now it is late afternoon, and Shadi says we should leave soon: night-time can be dangerous in al-Salam district. But then J’meeah arrives, and we find ourselves persuaded to stay a while and drink sweet mint tea. When dusk settles, Farrah lights lamps and even though it’s cool, we stay outside, among the cushions and the bloody cats. Shadi and I end up lingering for another while, as J’meeah tells us stories of when she used to be a camel driver, back in the days when this area had no tunnels and no
How-How
… just Bedouin tents and endless groves of almond and olive trees, their thirsty, tenacious roots pressing into the eastern Sinai.

Noor and I are still visiting families across the Strip. We venture to places I haven’t yet seen in Gaza, quiet villages tucked away inside the middle areas of the Strip, around Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat, where the war did not rage so violently, but people were still killed and homes destroyed. Because nowhere was safe. We listen to testimonies almost every working day, and by the time the weekend comes we are both physically and mentally exhausted.

One Saturday I return to my old haunt, Hammam al-Samara, to spend the afternoon steaming and bathing quietly. Abu Abdullah, the keeper of the
hammam
, is still there and as he welcomes me back, his moustache still twitches like a little silver fish. With quiet pride, he tells me that the old Turkish bathhouse somehow withstood the war without much damage.

I take my things into the changing area and undress, already enjoying the damp heat. Over the last fifteen months I have been here many times; this
hammam
has become a sanctuary of sorts, a place where I can retreat when I need some space from the maelstrom of Gaza. Today there are half a dozen other women inside the steam chamber. We greet each other, make friendly small talk and enthuse about spending the afternoon like this. But we say nothing about the war, as though there is some unspoken agreement between us not to discuss anything dark while we relax inside these thick, warm walls. I lie on my towel and chat to a young woman called Jehan, who tells me she’s a lawyer. Like me, she comes here to retreat from the cold realities of life in Gaza. I suddenly recall seeing her here several times before.

‘Ah – I know: you’re the one who always smokes in the changing room!’ I exclaim. She gives me a wink and we both laugh.

We lie side by side swathed in clouds of steam, as water pumps through the old pipes. After some time, another woman joins us in the steam chamber. She settles down, introduces herself and begins to tell me about her house being destroyed during the war. But Jehan immediately cuts her off.

‘
Habibti
–
khalas
! Stop speaking about the war! Talk of politics or war is for outside. We have come here just to relax.’

The woman falls silent, then moves away. I lie back on my towel and gaze up at the shoal of tiny portholes that refract small circular rainbows, feeling deeply relaxed for the first time since I came back. I am weary down to my bones.

I spend hours in the
hammam
, finally emerging in the late afternoon, scrubbed and glowing. I feel a hell of a lot better. I wander back into the main sitting area, to pay Abu Abdullah.

‘How long are you staying in Gaza?’ he asks.

‘I have to leave in a few weeks,’ I tell him. My three-month visa will expire at the beginning of April. I have very mixed feelings about going, but in my guts I do sense that it’s almost time for me to live outside Gaza again, before I burn myself out.

‘Have you seen any of the other
hammams
in the Middle East?’ he asks.

‘No – I haven’t.’

‘This is one of the oldest in the whole region,’ he says.

‘The house the Mamluks built!’ I joke.

Abu Abdullah nods and smiles. All of his gestures are leisurely. He points to a carving on the wall above, with a lengthy, intricate inscription embedded in the stone.

‘This is from the Mamluk period,’ he says, and again I hear that quiet pride in his voice.

The Mamluks were slave soldiers, traded across the lands of the Turks and raised as vicious fighters. Led by the ferocious and flame-haired Sultan Baybars, they swarmed over Egypt in the thirteenth century. Baybars’s defeat of the Mongols has been described as one of the most important battles in world history as he literally stopped the hordes in their tracks. He then set about wiping out the remaining Crusader kingdoms across the Middle East. Mamluk viceroys were appointed to major coastal cities, including Gaza, bringing peace and stability. In Gaza City, beefy Mamluk builders constructed Hammam al-Samara around this period, in the old quarter of the city near the ancient Orthodox church. It was fitted with a labyrinth of steam chambers, marble basins for ablutions, and this shoal of tiny portholes that allowed enough natural light to enter the chamber for women to disrobe and bathe in the nude without being spied upon by leering men.

The city itself was also beautified. The thirteenth-century Syrian scholar and geographer, al-Dimashqi, lyrically described Gaza as ‘a city so rich in trees it looks like a cloth of brocade spread out across the land’.
⁵²
But no empire lasts for ever, and three centuries later a new regional power rose to the fore. The Ottomans emerged from one of the Turkish principalities and captured Constantinople in 1453. Their leader, Selim I (nicknamed ‘Selim the Grim’), marched into Syria, capturing Gaza en route to the more important regional prize of Egypt – where he took the title, ‘Caliph of Islam’. Selim’s empire stretched across the Muslim world, and Gaza was sucked into the Ottoman province of Syria.

When I emerge from the steps of the
hammam
, the street feels cold and lonely. I am expected at Saida’s house for supper and decide to walk there – it is only about fifteen minutes away. I cross the busy street beside Souq al-Zawiya. Avoiding the crowds as best I can, I stroll down a narrow hill passing by a school and come to a roundabout where a single tree stands almost defiant, spanning the width of the small roundabout. This is the local landmark of Sidra – legend has it that a famous and beloved sheikh was buried beneath this tree long ago, and for that reason alone this tree can never be cut down.