With that wild gleam in her eye that couldn’t wait another minute, full of eagerness and passion, she said: “Yallah, parcel it up and throw it out already.” Every two or three days, “Yallah, parcel it up and throw it out already”: she was tidying up.
She emptied the closets. She emptied the storage space above the closets. She emptied the linen chest under the bed. She emptied the kitchen cupboards. She emptied the pantry. She emptied the glass-fronted sideboard and the chest of drawers with papers. She emptied her little storeroom next to my brother’s welding shop. Before and inside the piles she carried out a ritual purification that lasted for hours, governed by the ostensibly simple principle of: “What do we need this for?” Immediate need was god: cruel, uncompromising, impatient, and brief. Anything slightly damaged, shabby, crippled, or for which the immediate need was not immediately evident was sent to the “parcel.” The repeated sorting and sending to the “parcels” were a mirror image, a precise reflection of her mental map at a given moment, which could change a few days later: she never tired or despaired of this work of coordination between her outer and inner selves, of the indefatigable striving for a material reality whose features represented, with the greatest accuracy, the changing landscapes of her mind. She wanted to be “light, light,” she wanted to acquire possessions not for the sake of accumulation but exclusively on the basis of need.
At midday (the sorting, like all important things, took place in the morning) the discarded possessions rested on the porch, bundled in big sheets, waiting for their final removal. She sat among the bundles, eating a little rice with beans, surveying them with the thoughtful frown that always presaged energetic action, trying to make up her mind. “Who to give them to?” Immediately after announcing, “I can’t make up my mind who to give them to,” she would untie the knots in the sheets, open the bundles, and sort out their contents again, this time according to the recipients summoned to come “now” to get their things.
In the evening, when she turned on the sprinklers, which would flood the porch, there were only two bundles left without owners. They were dragged to the garbage can in front of the shack, where they stood like two potbellied sentries on either side. Everything was fresh: the mown lawn; the moist leaves of the lemon tree, which only ever yielded hard lemons without any juice; the new tablecloth waiting in its wrapping in the closet for the old one to be thrown out; the dull gleam of the polished copper vessels now lined up in a different arrangement on the kitchen shelf; the empty white spaces in the exemplary closets; the clean nightgown she put on after bathing; her hair washed and her mind quiet.
But a sleepless night followed the quiet and clarity: four or five times the bedside lamp was switched on and off, the pages of her book rustled. In this quarrel between darkness and light hesitations, doubts, and regrets emerged and metastasized from hour to hour, until the dawn broke. At five in the morning she stood next to the garbage can in her nightgown, rummaging in the bundles and the can itself to salvage and retrieve things that had been restored to grace during the conflict of the night.
Suspended between the two fates, deprived of citizenship and papers, the retrieved objects lay on the porch while she moved them one by one from corner to corner, where they wouldn’t catch her eye and remind her by their presence not of the sin of throwing them out but of the shame of changing her mind. Every morning, as she drank her coffee, she glanced at them out of the corner of her eye and looked away again, muttering to herself: “I always act and then regret it, act and regret, act and regret.”
ONCE (2)
“ONCE”: THE ENEMY of resilience, a luxury, the margins of the soul, the reserves. She had no reserves, no savings, real or symbolic. Alone, two adolescent children and a baby, a mother (hers) three quarters blind, a mother (Maurice’s) three quarters crazy, up to her neck in debt. She said: “A person (elbani-adam) has to know his day-to-day, what his day-to-day is.”
ONCE (3)
THE SECOND, THIRD, or fourth day before her death, in the hospital. I found her: the only days of her life when she was really there to be found, immobilized, situated where they had left her, only the light on her face changing and shifting with the passing of the hours. I found her crouching by the side of her bed, emptying the metal hospital locker. Tidying up a little, she said, downplaying the “little.” Piled on the bed were bags of fruit, cookies, wet wipes, a box of chocolates, a towel, three pairs of underpants, a tube of Voltaren for the pain in her back, two or three books, nail scissors, a checkbook, opened envelopes of telephone and electricity bills, an empty, decorated, gilt cardboard box, very elegant. She looked inside it, turned it upside down: “What was in it?” she wondered, a smile of relief dawning on her face: “Those petit-fours your sister brought,” she recalled.
She crammed the superfluous items into the box, pushing them down, making a parceclass="underline" “Take it when you go,” she commanded. Again she crouched down next to the locker, trying to release the jammed door: “These hinges need to be oiled, nobody’s oiled them for years. Go and bring a little oil from the kitchen,” she said. “What oil?” I didn’t understand. “Any oil will do, cooking oil, we’ll oil these things a bit.” Her face was pale, her neck too, a grayish pallor continuing from the faded gray mane of her hair. I brought a little oil in a plastic cup. She dipped a tissue in it and oiled the hinges, opening and closing the locker door: “You see?” she crowed. The family of the patient from Kalkiliya in the next bed looked at her in trepidation and awe. All of them were sitting on the bed: the father, three little girls, a two-year-old toddler, and a woman who appeared to be the patient’s sister. “Just like the rest of the hospital, nothing works like it should,” the mother confided in them. They were silent. The sick mother smiled at her with a certain effort, her face looking out over her husband’s arm. “Come, I’ll oil yours, too,” the mother volunteered, “so you can open and close it at least.” In the slippers that were too big for her, the big woolen shawl trailing behind her, she approached the next bed, growing paler with every step. The patient from Kalkilya’s locker was empty. There were four bottles of cola and Kinley standing on top of the locker. She oiled the hinges, opened and closed the door a few times, and then put three of the bottles into the locker, leaving one on top. “That’s better,” she said, passing her hand over the white surface, wiping away the rings left by the bottles.
ONCE (4)
THE FIRST “ONCE,” the first (perhaps) memory standing before every other first (like the tallest student in the class), not as a secret, but as a mold setting the shape of other memories, giving them their general appearance, mood, color: Sammy casting the three concrete steps leading to Nona’s quarter-shack, to the new entrance on the other side of the quarter-shack.
They opened up a door in the back to make the access from the mother’s shack more convenient. They cast the steps and the little concrete area above them. They paved the path winding from Nona’s to the mother’s house. The child watched Sammy casting the steps, installing the curving iron railing next to the steps for Nona to hold on to as she went down. She was one and a half and a bit: the warm touch of the flannel pants on her thighs, the sweater with the zipper in front, the smell of the wool with the smell of Nona’s ointment that stuck to everything, her eyes almost completely covered by her bangs, and her white socks sliding into her boots, leaving a gap of exposed skin between the hem of her trousers and the top of her boots (from a photograph of the child sitting on the carpet at the foot of the bed in the mother’s house).