The Hidden Light of Objects (10 page)

“I’m not sure. I hope not.”

“Do you like me?” She was a girl with guts.

“Yes. Very much.”

“Good. Should we start seeing each other?”

“Yes.”

I found the chink in our garden wall. She had a view of me in my corner. My view of her depended on her mood. Sometimes she would sit coyly on one of the garden chairs reading a book. Other times, usually when her parents were out, she would lie in the grass, her shirt casually scrunched up so I could catch a glimpse of her naked waist, sometimes even the lift of her breasts. Her feet, her thighs, her arms, her neck. I got to know her in pieces. Without planning, we figured out whose turn it was to pose and whose turn to stare through the gap. We had to be careful not to get caught by our parents. It was thrilling. I spent my days and nights buzzing. We would leave notes to each other in the chink. All the writing I had ever done had been for this. If Sireen fell in love with me, it was because of my letters to her. Her letters, less polished, were full of a wildness I had always suspected. That August, we shared a secret in the layers of our skin. Never touching, hardly in each other’s presence face-to-face, but always together in writing and in our wall-framed sightings of each other.

In early September, a few days before school was tentatively scheduled to begin – I say tentatively because you never knew when it would be decided that our education was a real threat to Israel’s security and had to be postponed for a few days, weeks, months – Sireen slipped me the following note:
Meet me here at midnight.
I thought I might collapse reading Sireen’s note, that my knees would give. I pushed my body against the gap, plugging it so she couldn’t see me trembling.

Those hours between reading that note and midnight were the best of my life. Everything seemed possible. Ghassan and Tarik were forgotten. Guns and bombs stopped falling. My dead friends and their lost fathers were lazing around in gardens bursting with late-summer bougainvillea. I could hear sea waves because we lived, not in the West Bank, but in the coastal town where my grandfather was born. My brothers and I together made four and not one of us had to be sacrificed for the cause like a lamb. My friends listed their favorite athletes and rock stars. They didn’t know what weapons were. We were hopeful and we were special. We would become doctors and lawyers and engineers and writers and we would change the world and the way people think about the world. We had the luxury to contemplate a universe beyond our borders: starvation and disease, the environment and animal vivisection, other people’s wars, but, also, the beauty of stars, the miracle of birds and fish finding their way home. Palestine was a place like any other, where great things could happen.

It wasn’t hard for Sireen and me to sneak out of our homes around midnight, to meet at our garden wall. It wasn’t hard to walk through our gates, to find a quiet alley in the dark. It wasn’t hard to look into her eyes, to touch, finally, the corners of her lips, her neck, her shoulders, her waist, the pieces of her I had memorized. I couldn’t hold her in my arms like they do in the movies. Some things are simply too much. Her breath smelled of oranges or apricots, maybe both. She was wearing a white top – was it a short nightgown? – and jeans. We were there for no more than twenty minutes. We hadn’t said a word to each other, but right before it was over she whispered, “Tomorrow. Again.”

And so it was, in the late weeks of summer or early weeks of autumn, again and again and again. Meeting in the dark alley, kissing parts of Sireen, touching more and more of her at once, whispering questions.

“Do you eat olives for breakfast?”

“Yes. Do you like to swim?”

“Yes. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A writer. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A mathematician. I think about numbers and shapes. What do you dream?”

“Of you. What do you dream?”

“Of dancing on the beach till dawn in a silver dress.”

“Did you know your fingers look transparent in the light?”

“Yes. Did you know you have a face like glass? It makes me want to lick it.”

I was at once mortified (my hairless face!) and incredibly aroused (Sireen wanted to lick me!).

As you can imagine, my life that September was a jump off a tall building, a walk under water. Everything fell away or floated around me until midnight. Now I know that the next part had to happen precisely when it did. The devil strolls in when angels get comfortable. I say “devil” and “angels” not because they’re here – like the
houri
s, they’re nowhere to be found – but because they’re so familiar, so immensely popular. Looking into your world from where I am, not something I can do with ease – it takes an ocean of concentration and the patience of a mountain – I realize that the minute things seem good will always be the instant the avalanche descends. This is one of the most important insights I’ve had in this skeletal void. Your parents spend everything they have on a new home; a bulldozer flattens it and crushes your youngest brother. You find the perfect job; your mother gets sick and you must quit to take care of her until the gruesome end. After years of delay, a matching liver is found for your best friend; he dies in a car waiting to get through a checkpoint manned by indifferent soldiers, the hospital fifteen minutes away. These things happen all the time. If you knew how often, maybe you’d stop being able to live. Or maybe you would live for the first time, without devils or angels.

In any case, it came, later rather than sooner, and exactly the way I figured. It was around mid-October and the weather was great – fresh and full of anticipation. Rami and I, at that moment, the sheriffs of youth and glory, were striding home from school. I glimpsed Ghassan and Tarik out of the corner of my eye. Motherfuckers. I wanted to speed up, wanted to run away, was ready to face the humiliation and shame of running away, coward that I was. Anything would have been better than what they were going to let us know. Blowing ourselves up in a school or at a bus stop. Let them jeer and point. I wanted to dance till dawn with Sireen, to feel her lick my face. I wanted to slow down time, to stretch it into the future, to let the past go. But there they were before us, the two bullies of the West Bank, there to blow us up and crush our bones. They asked Rami for cigarettes. I wanted to inhale jasmine and orange. They tried to smile at us, their gray teeth, their slits for eyes. They were telling us they were on our side, the side of our lost homeland. We were going to get it back together. I heard “assignment” and “operation.” I heard “outdoor café” and “weekend.” I heard “a belt of explosives” and “
houri
s in paradise.” I heard words coming out of their mouths I would never have guessed they knew: “maximize civilian cas­ualties” and “venerated martyrs,” “tactical gain” and “the greater good.” They had let us know, and they would be letting us know more in the next couple of days. “Not a word to anyone. Not even each other.” The encounter was over in a flash.

Now I knew. There it was spread out before me, a really bad hand. I wasn’t going to do it. I immediately told Rami I wasn’t going to. It was a relief to say it after all those months. It was a small liberation, a private expression of manliness to say no. I was a real tiger after all. Rami looked at me like I was insane. “They’ll kill you.”

“I refuse. I won’t and neither will you.”

“I’m going to do it, Nimr. I have to. We have to. We said we would. It’s the right thing to do. We have to do it for Palestine.”

I spent the next two days trying to talk Rami out of it. I didn’t believe Ghassan and Tarik would kill us for refusing to kill ourselves. That was absurd. I talked Rami’s ear off. I was manic, in a frenzy without limits. I circled around him every second of those two days. Rami was easy, he was relaxed, he was movie-star cool. He threw his head back and cackled. I didn’t understand how Rami could be so resigned. None of it made sense to me. Why would they choose us? Didn’t these kinds of things take months to train for? How could Rami accept this as easily as he would honey on his bread or sugar in his tea? Maybe Rami hadn’t forgotten about Ghassan and Tarik. Maybe he had been readying himself for exactly this.

The third day after Ghassan and Tarik spoke to us, they caught us again walking home from school. “It’s set. Tomorrow we deliver the explosives and plans. Day after tomorrow, you execute.” And they did. It was that simple. They delivered the belts to us in blue plastic bags their mothers had probably brought home from the fruit market. Right outside my house, casual as cats, they explained how to use them, how to set them off. They detailed exactly how we should get where we needed to be, what time we should depart, what routes to take. That was it. According to Ghassan and Tarik, by this time tomorrow Rami and I and twenty or, if we were lucky, thirty Zionist enemies would be dead.
Allah-hu akbar
.

Sireen and I were supposed to meet in the alley that night. I wondered what she would say about all this. Her responses were as unpredictable as war. I considered telling her but decided not to. That night, everything felt exaggerated – the dark darker, the silence more silent. Sireen was exceedingly beautiful and I was exceptionally horny. I know you’re probably wondering how I could have been thinking about sex at a time like that. I remind you that I was, maybe still am, fifteen. Sex and death aren’t that different to me. Sex and death make me want to live. And sex is something I think about all the time, even here in the vast beyond. In the heightened atmosphere of that crazy midnight, I wanted more from Sireen than I had asked for in the last month and a half.

“Just a little, Sireen. Just a little.” How many boys have said that to how many hesitant girls? I was completely ordinary that night before the most extraordinary day. I wanted exactly what every other boy my age wants. What little Sireen gave me that night is all I will ever have. The same panting and pulsing I now realize every adolescent boy and girl everywhere will feel until we are extinct. There was an eternity between us that night. I thought it was the beginning. I thought there would be more to come, so I pulled up my pants and she smoothed down her skirt, and we laughed together, louder than we should have, our parents, our neighbors so close. It didn’t matter. No one was listening that night.

The next day I woke up late, close to noon. I had the house to myself. It was the weekend. My mother would have been at the market, my father at the café playing
tawla
with his friends, and my brothers, the two as yet unmarried and living at home, hanging out in the streets. I took the blue plastic bag and sat in my tiny corner of the garden. This time no books, no notebook. I removed the bomb from the bag as carefully as folding origami. It looked harmless, a contraption I might have put together myself for fun. Sireen was peeking through the gap in the wall. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now. Sireen watched as I handled the explosive gently, tenderly, like a lover. It had colored wires going through it. It wasn’t very big, and I wondered how much damage it could do. I thought about how to get rid of it. I could bury it somewhere. I could find someone to disarm it. I could explode it in a field. I could return it to Ghassan and Tarik, surely they would understand. I could tell my father, he would know what to do.

My finger caught on a wire. I was careless. It was the last thing Sireen would see, the last thing she would hear. An ambulance came, too late for me, but for Sireen, to try to save her eyes, her ears. A fire truck. The inevitable soldiers making demands and threatening repercussions which, uncharacteristically, never came. I was pleased to learn the operation for that afternoon was cancelled and Rami got to live a few more years. He would die of a brain hemorrhage at eighteen, a rubber bullet to the head.

Things I know now: Life is pomegranate lips. Life should not be Sireen blind and deaf. Life is moist encounters in a back alley at midnight, not boys listing guns, playing with bombs. No promises of heaven and
houri
s. Enough. We want to see and hear everything, to dance until the sun rises with a girl in a silver dress. We want to gallop full speed ahead, the sheriffs of youth and glory. Not this darkness, this weight on my chest. Not this ending, not for us.

V

A certain light, hitting the cement platform of the drinking fountains, set hair on fire. If your hair was even the slightest bit brown, your head ended up, at a specific time of the morning, ablaze. It was the kind of light Graham Stevens captured in
Atmosfields
, a 1970s light that shone and blurred, stretched and curled. Light through inflated plastic, to the music of a Bach fugue. We were born into the warmth of that glow, in the year of the dog, though by the mid-1980s it was already being whittled away to the sharp, unforgiving, digital glare of the present.

Catching that light in the morning with our gossamer nets before class set the four of us free. Elsa, Rola, Sara, and me – the Musketeers plus one. We would wait for each other every day on that cement platform. Sara and I, neighbors, arrived together, usually first, then Elsa, then Rola, always last, on the coolest of the bright yellow Salmiya buses, bursting with some kind of news to tell, accompanied by laughter or tears. We would hug, slap hands, hook fingers like we hadn’t seen each other in years, every morning a fresh etch to sketch. That early light was a bag of tricks left casually untied. We were oblivious, never grabbing at the flight paraphernalia, never greedy for the tools of escape. Back then, we had our own ways to soar, to cartwheel away – flapjacking, thundersmacking – the four of us with hair on fire. When the weather began to cool, mid-October at the latest, we felt our youth in our throats. In the slats of our flat bellies, our churning hormones howled at us to kiss the boys and make them cry, as many as we could, quickly, quickly, our glittering locks urging us on. Out of the corner of my eye: Jonas at the gate like a starfish, a seagull, a Baltic wave pounding through gilded light. In he came, and the world opened as if forever.