Meet Me in Gaza (5 page)

Outside, just beyond the hotel terrace, the Mediterranean sparkles and rolls. We can see the decrepit, picturesque port, a modern version of the ancient port that stood just north of the city, where pagans once worshipped their god of fertility, Dagon.

Every day is clear, cold sunshine, only a rare cloud in the sky. No one told me Gaza could be so beautiful.

When we get fed up sitting around the al-Deira, Saida takes me shopping. We stand at the roadside, she flags down an ancient yellow six-door Mercedes and we squeeze inside with the other women on the back seats. It is a public taxi, ferrying people around the city for 2 shekels a ride, about 30 pence.
¹¹
This is my first ride in a public taxi, and the only thing that happens is that lots of people smile and say
marhaba
to me. Ten minutes later we climb out. Saida takes my hand in hers, guiding me like a child amid the crowds in a busy local shopping street and through the mouth of an unlit alley that spits us out into a long, narrow food market.

‘This is Souq al-Zawiya, and it is a good place for fresh fruit and vegetables,
habibti
,’ she says as we step over and around thick wires from small diesel generators roaring all around us, like angry beasts illuminating the
souq
. We wade through the crowd, Saida still firmly clasping my hand. When she stops to buy vegetables, I browse nearby. The swarthy traders are selling beef tomatoes and strong onions, trays of black olives slicked in oil, aubergines, red and green peppers, sheaves of parsley, dried herbs, herbs in oil – and pyramids of local strawberries so perfectly ripe I can still smell them through the heavy odours of sweat, piss, meat, mint, sage and rotting vegetables.

I buy a bag of silver-green sage leaves to drink with my tea, and a dollop of
fil-fil
, a red chilli paste in oil that comes in a little plastic sac. Saida says it will flavour fried vegetables and chicken, ‘but only use a little,
habibti
,’ she warns me, ‘you are not Gazan and it tastes like fire!’

When we emerge from the
souq
, the sudden darkness startles me. It looks so late, I check my mobile for the time. It’s only 6.30 in the evening, but it looks and feels like midnight. Saida and I are on a long street, lined on both sides with small stores selling clothes and scarves, and black, floor-length
jilbab
coats for women. Again I feel a visceral sense of being sucked back in time. As we start walking, I see these stores are all candlelit, each filled with shadows like those that haunt my living room.

An evening or two later, I am in my apartment finishing my dinner, wishing I had listened to Saida and gone easier on the
fil-fil
. My mouth is on fire and I’m gulping bottled water like a thirsty crow, letting it trickle straight down my chin and neck. Wiping my mouth, I go into the kitchen, turn on the tap and let the water run, to see if it might be OK for boiling. But it smells slightly dank, as usual, so I use more bottled water to make a brew, then settle down in front of the television. We have electricity right now, so I can watch the news on Al Jazeera International.

The news fascinates me because Gaza is always in it, and for the first time I can judge for myself how it reflects day-to-day realities inside a ‘war zone’. So far it reminds me, more than anything, of a trailer for the kind of action movies that Muhammad the driver watches – brief clips of drama, violence and tragedy, all strung together by a narrator with a deep, grave voice.

‘The only power plant in the Gaza Strip is scheduled to shut down in one hour.’

As the TV camera slowly pans across the brightly lit news studio and settles on the Al Jazeera newsreader – he’s dapper as a game show host – I remember my colleague Shadi warning me that Israel has now stopped all deliveries of industrial fuel to Gaza, and the power plant is spent. The newsreader opens his mouth, but just as he’s about to speak to camera, there is a soft
pop
and the screen blinks shut like an eye.

I am in a dark apartment on a dark street in a city with no power. The blackness is thick as sauce. The small knot of anxiety pebbles in my guts. Why the fuck did I choose to come and live here? But there’s nothing to do right now, except reach for my matches.

Someone knocks at my door.

‘It’s open.’

I am four floors up and don’t bother locking my front door, except at night, and even then I sometimes forget. It’s bombs that worry me here, not burglars.

‘They shut the power station and I want to see if you are OK.’

It’s my landlord’s son, Ali, who lives with his wife just across the landing. Sometimes he and I sit and smoke a cigarette or two together.

‘I’m fine. Come on in.’

Ali is carrying a candle. The tip of his cigarette glows red.

‘Come – look out of your kitchen window at our city,’ he says.

I follow him into my kitchen, touching the walls to make sure they’re still there. We stand at the window together, gazing across the city, where a sea of tiny candles are flickering, as though we are in a ship slowly sinking beneath the waves.

At work the next morning I am asked to draft an appeal to the ‘international community’, urging them to pressurise Israel into immediately resuming fuel supplies to Gaza. Seven hundred thousand people are now without mains electricity. Gaza City’s biggest hospital – al-Shifa – has patients on kidney dialysis, and premature babies in incubators, whose lives depend on generators for which the hospital has no spare parts and barely any fuel. Bakeries have shut down because there’s no fuel for the ovens. The Gaza Ministry of Religious Affairs is appealing for emergency supplies of concrete for a new cemetery, saying it is running short of space to bury the dead.

I spend an hour at my desk, drafting the appeal. Whoever this amorphous international community actually
is
– and I’m really not sure – it has boycotted Gaza and the Gazans ever since Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006. So I don’t feel too hopeful. It’s a bit like writing an appeal to God.

When I look up from my screen, Shadi is standing in the doorway, smoking.

‘I came to see if you are OK,’ he says.

‘Thanks – but I’m fine. You OK too?’

‘We are used to this in Gaza.’ He offers me his grey, mocking-the-situation smile.

Shadi is always looking out for me, always inviting me for coffee with him and his friends at the al-Deira Hotel, and giving me a lift home in his ‘best-in-the-West’ old banger afterwards. I’ve been to his home too, and shared supper with his wife and three children. His eldest son is a teenage rapper, his wife is a therapist. Among his family, Shadi seems somewhat mellower; he sprawls on the couch and slows down for a little while – until his phone rings and he immediately fumbles for his car keys. Wherever I see him, he’s always deliberately and defiantly cheerful. But this morning his face is drained.

We publish the appeal that afternoon. Then we all go home. Twenty-four hours later Israel allows limited shipments of fuel to enter Gaza and the power plant partially reopens. But the acute sense of uncertainty still grips the city. I can almost feel Gaza holding its breath, like a bolshy teenager with a broken face, hoping his father’s mood will be better tonight.

When the electricity has come back on, I decide to make more use of my time off work and take Arabic lessons. Joumana, the secretary at the Centre, offered me Arabic lessons when I first arrived, but I didn’t take her up on it. But now my lack of Arabic is really starting to cramp my style. I want to hold my own with my new friends and their families – like Saida’s mother, Hind – and to meet Gazans who don’t speak English. So I ask Joumana if I can arrange these lessons and she gives me the number for Mounir, the
ustaz
, or teacher, that the Centre employs to tutor its foreign staff. I’m the only foreigner at the Centre right now, but there have been a string of others before me. I call
Ustaz
Mounir and we arrange a lesson at my apartment after work on Sunday.

Mounir arrives bang on time. I buzz him through the gate, but it’s a good few minutes before he knocks at my fourth-floor front door. When I open the door, he’s outside, breathing heavily.

‘Eighty-eight stairs. You live at the top of your building.’

He doesn’t look, or sound, very happy to be here. I invite him inside, offer him an armchair and ask if he’d like some tea. ‘Yes, please,’ he replies without smiling.

His blue suit is slightly too big for him, his eyes are very dark and his gaze hard. I serve us both tea infused with sage and watch him spoon three heaped sugars into his glass mug. Resting the mug on the coffee table, Mounir unpacks sheets of exercise papers and a large notebook from his briefcase.

‘I have been teaching Arabic to foreigners for more than fifteen years.’ He sounds righteous as a judge. ‘Have you studied our language at all?’

‘I had some lessons while I was living in Ramallah.’

‘So what can you say?’

Clearing my throat, I start speaking. But I’m immediately self-conscious, stumbling over words and phrases that I’m familiar with, because this feels like an exam. I pause, lose my train of thought, then pick up the thread again. I feel myself blushing. Oh, shit.

Mounir holds his pen poised but writes nothing, merely watches and listens intently, asking me to repeat some words. Then he is silent. I look down at the carpet, which is red and brown and swirly, total 1970s kitsch. I’m not sure I really want these lessons.

‘Your problem is that your first Arabic teacher was an amateur,’ he states. ‘So we are going to have to start right back at the beginning.’

My first Arabic teacher – Sharif – was from Gaza. He is Saida’s cousin, but I met him while I was in Ramallah. He was studying journalism at Beir Zeit University, just outside Ramallah, and teaching Arabic to foreigners like me to support himself. Sharif left Gaza in 2005, after securing a permit from the Israeli authorities to travel to Ramallah for just twenty-four hours. By the time I met him, he had been in the West Bank for two years without a permit. This left him in the surreal, and lousy, predicament of effectively being an illegal immigrant in his own country; at constant risk of being stopped at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank and sent straight back to Gaza.
¹²
He travelled the few miles between Ramallah and Beir Zeit University every day, but never any further.

‘I escaped from one prison, and here I am inside another!’ he laughed bitterly during one of our lessons.
¹³
He was 22 years old – though he looked about 16 – and missed his family badly, but couldn’t risk visiting them because he was afraid Israel would not allow him to leave Gaza again, and then the education his parents had saved for would be ruined. Sharif didn’t want me to go to Gaza. He said it was a prison filled with broken people and shattered dreams.

Mounir is pulling no punches about his opinion of my first teacher. But he’s right. Sharif was an amateur. Glancing at his wristwatch, Mounir puts down his pen.

‘Excuse me, I have to pray now,’ he says.

I nod and sit back on the couch as he unlaces his shoes, places them neatly beside the chair, kneels, then prostrates himself on the carpet, softly praying aloud. He appears completely at ease, worshipping in front of me as the muezzins’ call echoes through the streets. There is literally a mosque on every corner of Gaza and I often see men unfurling prayer mats and kneeling to pray on street corners.

A few minutes later, his prayers finished and shoes re-laced, Mounir sits back down and for the first time he smiles at me.

‘Your colleagues at the Centre tell me they call you
Louisa Laziza
,’ he says. ‘Do you know what it means?’

I do. My nickname at work is a gentle play on words.
Laziza
means sweet in Arabic and rhymes with my name, so it’s stuck. I like it. Compared with most of my previous nicknames, it’s a gem.

Now we are both smiling and the atmosphere between us feels easier. Mounir asks me again, more gently this time, to speak in Arabic. At first I still stumble, searching for the correct words in the right order, but with him prompting me I slowly describe a recent evening in a nearby café with some friends, and walking home afterwards just as the power went off for the night. With no light pollution and no moon, the stars shimmered like a mirror shattered across the black sky.

He is a good listener, my new teacher. I relax, and then of course the words begin to flow a little. But soon, glancing at his wristwatch again, he says he has to go. Gathering his things, he pauses by the door for a moment and offers me his hand – a formal but friendly gesture. We shake briefly, standing well apart. But we have scheduled our next lesson. I’ve even asked for homework.

‘I think you are interested in learning something about our life here,’ he says, looking me in the eye for the first time. ‘If you study well, I will open the doors of our beautiful language to you. And you will hear stories that will amaze you.’

Palestinians speak Levantine Arabic, a dialect of modern standard Arabic. The Levant, ‘country of the sunrise’, is a wide strip of the eastern Mediterranean coast, now divided between Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.