Matt Rees - A grave in Gaza

Omar Yussef remembered the myth. He also recalled that it started with Atum arousing himself and engendering other gods with his orgasm. He hoped that hadn’t been in the book Nadia had read.

“What do you think of the myth?” he asked.

“I think it makes sense. It explains why so much of life is sad and why we face so much wickedness, no matter how good we are.”

“Perhaps Atum was crying tears of joy.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, Grandpa. But I don’t think he was, anyway.”

“I’m glad that you’re reading about history and how ancient people understood the world. There’s much more to life than the views expressed by people in our own town and in our own time. I have other books like that one. I’ll show them to you when I get home.”

“Grandpa, I made you a homepage.” Nadia was suddenly excited.

“You drew something for me?”

“What? No. For your website. I started it yesterday, after we spoke. I registered your domain name, and I wrote the text for the homepage and I posted a photo of you and I did some graphics, too.”

“What’s a homepage?”

“When people type in the address of your website, the homepage is the first one that will come up. Of course, I have to make other pages, so they can navigate through the site.”

She has grown up more than I realized, Omar Yussef thought. She understands the sadness at the core of the world in the story of the Egyptian god’s tears. But she also has this technological excitement, which suggests she believes in the future. He wondered how this change in his favorite grandchild had crept up on him. Perhaps he missed other changes in the world around him, too, simply because they didn’t directly affect him. He remembered that he had been surprised when Salwa Masharawi told him her husband had been tortured. Now his surprise seemed alien to him, as though he would take it for granted that any man arrested for criticizing the government would have the soles of his feet beaten. Since that time in jail so long ago, he had spent decades building a wall of innocence around himself, but he had lost some portion of it in Gaza. Perhaps it hadn’t been innocence, after all, but blindness. He understood why the god Atum had cried when he looked on the world he had made.

“Grandpa, is there a computer in your hotel?”

“Yes, there’s a computer at the reception desk.”

“Do they have internet access?”

“I can ask them. There’s a very nice lady at reception.”

“Write down your homepage address. It’s www.pa4d.ps. ”

Omar Yussef wrote the web address on a piece of hotel notepaper. “What does that mean?”

Nadia laughed. “You’ll see. You have to go and call it up on the web. Do you want to talk to Grandma?”

“Yes, please, my darling.” Omar Yussef folded the slip of paper with the web address on it and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

He pulled back the drapes on his window. The hotel drive rose twenty yards from the lobby doors to the main beach road. The haziness of the dirt-filled air was thickening into twilight. A donkey trotted along the road, pulling a cart piled with boxes of tomatoes. A string of yellow taxis followed, sounding their horns and jockeying to be the first to overtake. A detail of red-bereted soldiers leaned against the guardpost outside the chief of Military Intelligence’s home across the road. The building was a plain apartment block six stories high. Only one floor was illuminated, a sickly fluorescence glowing through the dust.

Maryam came on the line. “Omar, dear, what did you have for lunch?”

He felt the loneliness again, sharply. “Maryam, my life, I love you.”

“Omar?”

“I’ll come home soon, I promise.”

“Omar, is something wrong?”

Omar Yussef’s eyes stung. He thought it might be a good idea to cry out all the dust from the storm. He felt ready for it. His room was cold and he imagined himself imprisoned in it, far from home. You know what it’s like to be shut away, terrified and alone, he thought. He was nauseous and he feared ruining everything that night by nervously throwing up his meal at Professor Maki’s dining table. He breathed deeply and fought to visualize his wife’s face. “I had a good lunch at the home of a friend.”

“Good. Don’t let Magnus take you to a restaurant. They cut corners with their recipes.”

“I’m eating at the home of a-a friend tonight, too.”

“Did Nadia tell you about your homepage?”

“Yes, did you see it?”

“No, she won’t show it to anyone until you’ve approved it.”

“She’s very clever.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No, I’m proud. I should get ready for dinner now, Maryam.”

“Go ahead. Everyone is fine here, may Allah be thanked.”

He hesitated. “You’re my whole life.”

Maryam laughed. “Omar, are you going to start singing me old songs? Allah bless you, darling.”

Omar Yussef hung up. Three jeeps halted at the home of General Moussa Husseini across the street. He assumed they were changing the guard shift, but the men at the gate remained at their posts and the jeeps didn’t leave. Instead, they formed a cordon around the entrance. The soldiers in the jeeps jumped from the rear of their vehicles and jogged through the door of the apartment building. On every floor, the lights came on. Then they all went out at once.

Omar Yussef turned off his lamp and watched Husseini’s house. Nothing happened. He waited. Perhaps it had been only a routine bolstering of the guard. This might have been how they always prepared for the onset of night. Except that tonight there’s a dust storm, he thought. The darkness will be doubled.

Ataxi dropped Omar Yussef on Emile Zola Street at seven-thirty. He rested his hand against the smooth bark of a tall sycamore and coughed. Dirt gusted through the air. With the falling darkness, the thick dust storm turned Omar Yussef’s vision into a monochrome blur. The branches of the tree danced above him, jousting with the tricolor behind the wall of the French Cultural Center. The metal loopholes in the flag scratched rhythmically against its pole.

The wind came from behind him, caught his white hair and blew his little combover into his eyes. He moved carefully. Even here, in Gaza City’s most expensive district, the sidewalk was uneven. He caught his toe on a protruding brick, forced out of its place in the diamond pattern underfoot by the roots of another old sycamore, and stumbled. With relief, he came to a gate and found a buzzer. Next to it, scribbled on the whitewashed wall, was the name Maki.

Beyond the tall garden wall, the wind abated. Omar Yussef fixed his hair with a plastic comb from his shirt’s breast pocket. He rubbed his shoes on the back of his trousers to clean away the dirt. The garden was lush and tropical. Omar Yussef wondered if Maki might be to blame for Gaza’s water shortage, the grass was so thick and the spiky feet of the date palms were swamped by so many low fern bushes. The path to the house was short, but it wound around a fountain of molded concrete and turquoise tile. A large plastic doe peered from behind a bush next to the bubbling water. Omar Yussef pressed his palm to her snout and stroked her head as he passed.

The plain mahogany door opened as Omar Yussef came up the steps to the porch. A tiny maid in a brown nylon housecoat held it for him and greeted him in deferential, whispered English. She was narrow and straight and bony, almost like a little girl. Omar Yussef assumed from her look and accent that Maki had shipped her in from India or Sri Lanka. Omar Yussef thanked her and looked around. He had never seen such luxury in the home of a Palestinian. The floors were a milky brown marble polished to shine like the surface of a summer lake. At the center of the room, there was a brilliant chandelier so large that the last Shah might have thought it ostentatious, and a dining table and chairs not less sparkling than the floor. For a small girl, the maid put in a lot of elbow work.