Under a roof that is not my own, in a modest home in Al-Shati Refugee Camp, I lie in the small bedroom of a child who, along with his parents, fled to the South of the Strip seeking safety, only to meet their doom there. I try to sleep, overcome by a fear that the family will return to surround me, bringing with them nightmares other than those currently hovering overhead. My wife and children lie beside me, war-weary and exhausted. I hear the rumbling of their stomachs and mine as the buzz of the drone grows louder, the two sounds coalescing in a new symphony of torture.
From inside this hell, in this dazed state of terror, I write to you about my adventure yesterday, offering a testimony of defeat from a man who longs for a hot bath like the ones he used to take before the war. It’s a tale that might astonish you, perhaps whetting your appetite for an inventive new work of literature, one full of imagination about an author who becomes a professional thief, like Zorro without the mask, who masters the art of running long distances across high wires in his quests for food—or at least scraps left behind by soldiers armed to the teeth with malice…
I left at seven in the morning accompanied by men with whom I really don’t belong, who specialise in bravery and brute force but can barely read or write. We set out in search of flour to distribute in our neighbourhood.
After hunger spread throughout northern Gaza, it became necessary to shed the guise of mental and physical wellbeing and the prestige of profession and reputation. A strange condition took hold of me. Just like Ibrahim al-Warraq in The Bookseller’s Notebooks (which my friend Jalal Barjas wrote), I changed into a form completely different from the one I was in before the war. But unlike al-Warraq, I didn’t transform into the heroes of adventure novels, who can work pure miracles with their special skills. I can’t break through walls or run faster than the speed of sound—I don’t even know the ways and means of excavating food from abandoned homes. So I resolved to do without these extraordinary abilities and to follow the lead of young men whose faces had grown pale.
We dragged carts that street sweepers used to use while all manner of planes flew above us. We raced our shadows through the destroyed alleyways, searching the narrow spaces between walls that bore pictures and testimonies of the people buried alive there. All this in hopes of procuring a can of tuna or a handful of rice. We ignored the outstretched hands that were begging for salvation after decay and stray cats and dogs had eaten away at them. We let the fact that the bodies were deteriorating be a consolation to us—for, as they say, ‘the living take priority over the dead’—so we could continue carrying out our great patriotic mission of collecting any food we could find for the children, the women, and the elderly.
The problem is that, as the proverb goes, ‘the pitcher doesn’t always survive the pour’—it could break into pieces at any fleeting instant. This is precisely what happened to me yesterday. Suddenly, it was our turn to ascend to the sky, because a soldier—let’s call him Arpaxad, or perhaps Yitzhak or Shlomo—was operating a quadcopter drone from the comfort of his office, competing with his fellow soldier Sara to kill me and my companions. His reward would be a night of passion and hedonism bursting with every colour besides red.
At that moment, we were crossing the camp’s small park. With its fences felled and its flowers and trees cut down, the area had become an immense expanse of rubble, colours overlapping on a chaotic canvas. When the dust from the bombings cleared, all the colours were replaced by a deep red. My companions went beyond the Last Sky, joining the ranks of Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Neruda, Ghassan Kanafani, Majed Abu Sharar, and Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, while I alone remained, stuck in the frame of the poem. I didn’t ride Sinbad’s magic carpet with them, because I am afraid of death, and I don’t know what will come to pass afterwards, so instead I donned Zorro’s mask and took refuge in the body of Wolverine from the Marvel films and, after transforming into a phoenix, I flew at lightning speed back to the house. With my body shaking and dripping with sweat despite the chill, my blood staining the walls, I arrived home.
My wife asked, ‘Did you bring food?’
‘No.’
‘Will the children have to sleep through another night on an empty stomach?’
‘I don’t know.’
I returned, defeated, to the park of death, and to the plastic bags filled with chickpeas and corn. There, my supernatural powers returned to me. The soldier had failed to kill all of us, and there would be no wild night with Sara, complete with vodka and mixed nuts. My cohorts were waiting for me to carry the pieces of their bodies back to the refugee camp. Perhaps I could have turned them into a Frankenstein’s monster powerful enough to avenge their blessed souls, but I failed to distinguish their features from one another in order to rearrange them such that they could depart unto God in a proper state. So I buried them together in a large tunnel with enough space for all my wounds.
But the tunnel wasn’t spacious enough for the cry of the child who has been appearing to me in a continuous nightmare, the child who used to sleep in the very same room whose air I’m breathing now along with the smoke of bombs, the boy who fled south in search of safety, after the Israeli soldiers tricked him and his family, saying the shelters there were safe. They burned there inside of a schoolroom, and the wind scattered their ashes until they reached this room. They are with me in my dreams, following me everywhere so I will fight for justice for them, without understanding that the world’s moral codes will transform into a reality in which ‘the pens have been lifted and the pages have dried’.
I will sleep now in the hope that this long night will end, and with the knowledge that the blood of the victims has been caught on tape.
*
Translated from the Arabic by Graham Liddell
*
Yousri Alghoul is from Gaza and is the author of six short-story collections and two novels, most recently Clothing that Miraculously Survived. He has been a featured speaker on Palestinian affairs at events in Asia, Europe, and the US.
‘A Life Dipped in Blood’ was published in our Summer 2024 issue and was read in English and Arabic at the International Literature Festival, Dublin, in May 2024. Yousri, who lives with his family in a refugee camp, is raising funds in an attempt to provide safe passage for his four children — Anas, Majd, Osama and Rauf — out of Gaza. Please consider donating to the GoFundMe campaign via the link below.
A Gazan Father’s Plea: Help My Children Escape the Darkness
*