Laura Gordon, March 22, 2009
Abu Jameel was waiting in a white pickup truck by the side of the road with the same beard he grew in Ramadan 2003. He was glowing and listening indulgently, waiting for my cab driver to run out of steam with how he’d driven me an extra three or four blocks and all I’d given him was three extra shekels. He kissed me on both cheeks and put me in the truck with three little smiling girls in the front seat and the cab backed out of the dirt road and Abu Jameel drove forward. I asked him whose girls they were and he said they were his. Nancy and Bassant and Haneen. Aseel was at preschool and Fatima the baby was with Nura at home and Jameel was with his grandmother. It was one of those moments of five years passing. Last time I’d seen them, Nancy had been a tiny hairless two-year-old and Bassant in a baby chair and Haneen and Aseel hadn’t been born. I did one of those extended family double-takes. Here were these little babies, all grown up overnight, laughing and talking with braided ponytails, and here I was telling them how last time I saw them they were this big, and they were loving being told how small they had been. He parked the car and we walked through a courtyard with trees and there was Nura, holding a blond, blue-eyed baby and looking exactly the same, wearing mismatching headscarf and a bright, comfortable dress for hanging out inside the house and being a mom surrounded by little girls.
In all the reuniting, there have been a number of bittersweet encounters with people whose lives have dead-ended or people who have settled for something less than they wanted in life and you really feel the five years. One friend got married, moved into her husband’s beautiful but isolated house with her two kids in a city where she knows no one and never goes out. Her husband, pleasant but boring, lost his government job when Hamas took over, and like the other government employees in the same situation collects a salary from the rival government in Ramallah to sit around at home and do nothing. Another friend’s brother’s house was destroyed and keeps getting his visa to the UK rejected and wants to know why I haven’t been in touch.
With Nura and Abu Jameel and the girls it was different, simple and direct, like we’d just seen each other yesterday. Life has been hard for them, too, harder than for many of my old friends, but they’re just that kind of people who absorb people easily, without pretense. It was a perfect sunny morning. We sat in the living room around a tray of bread and cream cheese and tea, eating breakfast.
My Arabic is still broken, but it’s much better than it was in 2003, and one of the joys in coming back is being able to talk a little easier with people. I had heard from mutual friends that the home they built on their farm had been destroyed a week after the bombing was over but I hadn’t heard the whole story. They had been living in different houses, Abu Jameel with his sister and Nura and the girls with her family, for two months while they looked for a new place to live. It’s not easy to find places to live anymore in Gaza. Since so many people have lost their houses, there’s been a huge housing crisis. They finally found this new place and have been living there for less than a week. It’s a beautiful one-story surrounded by a courtyard with fruit trees.
(Read on …)
