Gaza Weddings by Nasrallah Ibrahim;Roberts Nancy;

Author:Nasrallah, Ibrahim;Roberts, Nancy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Why are you always late?

“You’re always late!” Amna blurted out angrily. “Why is that?!”

“You mean he isn’t here?”

“That’s right, Randa. He isn’t here.”

She’d talked to me a lot about Aziz. Once she said, “Since you’re like my own daughter, I can’t help thinking about your future, and I’ve decided you need a husband like Aziz. Now to tell you the truth, I’ve talked to him about the idea, too. I said to him, ‘You need a bride as sweet as you are, and I’ve got the girl for you. Her name is Randa!’”

“Whoa! Take it easy now, Auntie! One of these days I’m going to wake up to find out that I got married without even knowing about it!”

She sidled up to me and, after making sure nobody was within ear shot, she whispered, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve gotten a lot older, but I’m not old-fashioned. To this day I still sneak out for secret rendezvous with Jamal. Don’t you dare tell anybody, though! They’re still after him, you know, and I’d die if I were the cause of some harm coming to him.”

All her talk about Aziz had really piqued my curiosity. I’d even jotted down some impressions of him in my notebook. I was curious about him not the way a girl would be curious about a guy, but as an aspiring writer, or as a collector of stories about Palestine.

Amna said, “Sometimes he comes to the cemetery and scans the place to get an idea of how many empty graves there are. I can see he’s doing it without his telling me so. Well, one day he didn’t find a single empty grave, and he started to cry. He cried like a baby. I took him into my arms and rocked him. He clapped his hands over his eyes, but he still kept on crying, and the tears seemed to be coming from somewhere far, far away. For all I knew, they were coming from the funeral of this land’s first martyr—or maybe from Jesus’s funeral. His tears seemed tired, like us. So when I rested his head on my shoulders, I don’t know if it was his head that I was resting there, or tears that, like us, have been looking for a shoulder to fall on.”

“‘Oh, God, I’m worn out!” he moaned, as if he were a thousand years old.

“One time he said, ‘You know, Auntie Amna, once this occupation’s over, I’m never gonna touch a shovel again, not even to plant flowers!’

“‘Don’t say things like that!’ I cried. ‘That’s just what the occupiers would want! They want us to stop being beautiful and loving beautiful things. Don’t give them the satisfaction.’”

She stopped talking for a while. Then she confessed, “To be honest, I don’t think he’ll hold up till the occupation’s over.”

It was on account of this comment of hers that I agreed to come meet him. He seemed to give off a special sort of light.

We looked all over for him that day. We passed by all the checkpoints.

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