The Dreaming Machine wishes to extend its solidarity to Ahmed Masoud and all the writers and population of Gaza who for the past seven months have been experiencing the death and destruction wreaked by the Israeli army. We take this opportunity to announce the upcoming release of the Italian translation of Come What May (Costi quel che costi), to be published by Valeria di Felice edizioni and launched in early June with an italian tour of the author.
Chapter 1
‘Who cares? One more person dead, so what?’
‘I do. He is . . . was my husband.’
He stared at me as though a crazy person were standing in front of him: a helpless woman begging an official to believe her – a human wreck. The look in his eyes was confusing. Was it sympathy? Disgust? Or simply boredom?
His dark olive skin appeared warm despite the cold wind outside, and his roll-neck woollen jumper reached up to meet his half grey beard, which was like a hedge growing wildly from the tip of his sideburns and his curly hair. Here was a man who didn’t give much thought to his looks – unmarried maybe? His small, piercing black eyes made him appear intense. The heavy blue police jacket he was wearing was a little dusty. I wasn’t sure whether he had fallen over earlier or he simply hadn’t washed for a long time. There was something about his ruggedness which gave him a strong presence.
The office was almost empty, save for a long metal desk which had a square telephone and a black Dell computer screen on it. The wires trailed down to the floor where the hard drive lay flat on its side. I noticed the keyboard was white. There was a big office chair behind, tucked very close to the desk.
Nouman was sitting at the edge of the desk, next to a nameplate:
Detective Sargent Nouman El Taweel
Head of Criminal Investigation
And, as his surname suggested, he was indeed a tall man.
‘Tell me Mrs. Tanani, why do you think your husband was killed?’ he asked, flipping over a page of the desk calendar so it showed the current date: Tuesday 22nd December 2016.
From where we were sitting in Gaza’s El Abbas police station I could hear the distant sounds of the beach.
‘I don’t think he was killed. I know he was . . . he’s dead now.’
‘Oh, yes, I am sorry. I meant murdered.’
He was looking away from me as if he didn’t want to tell me what he had in mind – he didn’t want to let his eyes betray him. He kept tapping the desk with three fingers, very lightly and repetitively. He did this every time he asked a question, which was incredibly distracting. I followed his gaze towards the corner of the ceiling. There were no pictures or framed Quranic verses on the walls, as was usually the case with Hamas government offices. There was a spider dangling right down to the window ledge, and Nouman was observing it intensely, waiting to see if it would travel all the way to the floor. But something made the spider stop: maybe it was listening to our conversation and eagerly awaiting my answer. I could swear it was looking at me with pity.
Nouman was typically Middle Eastern, with very well defined dark features, high cheekbones, thick lips, curly hair – all of that. If you had a remote control and paused him just before he was about to talk, you might have mistaken him for a pantomime actor. But he wasn’t, he was the real thing. A lot of men in Gaza looked like that, yet he looked very special and handsome.
There was no electricity or heating in the office. The sound of wind whistled in, yet a thin sliver of sunlight broke through the thick dark clouds outside, lending a touch of brightness to the dark room. My body shivered despite the sudden appearance of the sun. The black gown on top of my short-sleeved blue top and jeans provided me with hardly any warmth. Someone on the radio had mentioned this morning that 2016 was the coldest and hottest year on record. We started the year with rain and floods, and now December wanted to finish off the year with extra freezing weather to ensure the statistics were proven correct. Or maybe it was just nature’s way of washing away all the memories and pain of the dreadful wars.
‘Mr. Taweel, I don’t think you believe my story and it seems as though I am wasting my time here.’
His eyes followed me as I gathered my stuff, lifted up the loose white headscarf which was resting on my shoulders and tightened it on my head. I could almost hear his breathing as I hurried out of the door.
Another disappointing meeting: rushing out of another office onto another cold empty street, another straw lost. I didn’t want to stay any longer, didn’t want any further humiliation, sarcastic looks, stupid questions.
There weren’t many people about. A donkey cart passed by, led by a small boy of around ten years. A stray cat jumped down from a large bin filled with loosely tied plastic bags. I turned left out of the police station. Two police guards, sitting on chairs outside, wrapped in heavy coats, touched their Kalashnikovs as if getting ready for a battle. I smiled and said Assalam Aleikom, laughing underneath at the paranoia we lived in, at how frightened those two poor sods were of a woman who was just on her way out.
I continued walking up the hill, all the way towards the big building of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the PLC, at the top of the triangular El Rimal Public Park where the statue of the Unknown Soldier once stood. The air smelled very clean, a hint of citrus coming from a few trees in the middle of the park. An old man was roasting sweet potatoes by the side of the road. A little boy next to him was feeding the fire with twigs, and the large barbeque pot looked precarious as it rested on three big stones. But the fire and the smell of roast potatoes mixed with the citrusy air were very comforting. They brought back memories of better days: of me and Ammar before we got married; of laughing out loud on the street and being stared at by old men in suits and conservative men in jellabiyas. They were happy days, the kind of feeling you get on a summer holiday, a rest in between life’s hectic schedules, a chance to switch off completely, waking up to warm sun on a beach somewhere, eating exotic food, meeting new people. That was what Gaza was like in the late 1990s; a city taking a break from wars, a promise that life was or could be okay.
We used to skip lectures at El Azhar University back in 1999 and walk down here as fast as we could. Once at the of foot of the Unknown Soldier, we would take a few steps towards the main gate of the PLC building and make sure to see the tacky golden dome, built as a weird replica of El Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Ammar would wink at me as we spotted it, then he would count to three before we split in different directions. He always took the right-hand street which led to El Shifa Hospital, past Delice Coffee Shop, while I continued straight down the hill, past El Abbas Police Station and all the way to the New Port. The aim of the game was to see who would reach the beach first.
Ammar always won the race even though his route was much longer, and apparently he never took a taxi, usually arriving without a drop of sweat on his wide forehead, no matter how hot it was. Ammar was the gentlest man any woman could wish for. He was tall with long straight hair. He never had a beard and wasn’t interested in growing one. His wide brown eyes always glimmered when he smiled, which along with his dimples made him exceptionally irresistible. Unlike many Palestinian men, he wasn’t hairy. In fact, far from it – he hardly had a hair on his chest.
We would sit on a big stone at El Mina El Jadeeda and watch the waves crashing into the unfinished port, discussing the lectures we had missed and wondering which of Shakespeare’s lines the lecturer would have mispronounced.
***
We were both second-year students in the English department at El Azhar University in Gaza City, an institution that was born as an extension to the Mosque in Cairo, but had grown secular and was supported by Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority at the time.
Learning Shakespeare in Gaza was hilarious – as if we didn’t have enough tragedies here already, or the troubles of the kings and queens of Europe were more important. Maybe if the great writer were here he would have written different plays altogether. Maybe at least Othello would have looked slightly different and wouldn’t have been referred to as a beastly Moor. If only Shakespeare had met my Ammar, he would have written about how gentle the ‘Moors’ are.
But the great writer was very famous in Palestine because of the endless Egyptian Arabic adaptations for theatre and screen. Though I never thought I would be Prince Hamlet myself, looking at the ghost of my own murdered husband and seeking justice. I had hoped that these stories only existed on paper, not in real life, and certainly not in Gaza.
At university we studied Henry V, which brought hope to some of us in class that one day we would have a leader who would be able to lead the few to victory, enable the weak to grow stronger, give faith to those who had lost all hope. A leader who would bring a smile to our faces, who would look us in the eye and shout, “Once more unto the breach dear friends once more, or stop up the wall with our Palestinian dead.” But instead, Yasser Arafat came along and brought with him an entourage – a corrupt band of brothers.
The Romantics took us to a faraway land, a fantasy space that could only exist in our minds. We tried to imagine what they were talking about – the green lands, the lakes, the sunsets, the trees and the daffodils. But every time we got closer to learning how they lived and what they thought about, a nearby explosion of an Israeli missile crushed our fantasy – literally. Still, we laughed at Byron’s pet baby bear in Oxford, we memorised Wordsworth’s words and even got excited when he mentioned Palestine in one of his poems. But the trouble with the Romantics was that they saw the world through their own eyes only. Their rich upper class view of the world meant they didn’t have to worry about the stuff we cared about. They didn’t have to worry about food or safety, they didn’t know what it meant to wake up in the morning worrying about starving before thinking about how the ‘beloved’ might feel.
We hated Robinson Crusoe – that colonial prick was too close to home. We couldn’t tolerate that imperialist propaganda, so we organised protests outside the office of the head of department, Professor Marwan. We met with the president of the university and demanded the book be removed from the curriculum. There were only five of us leading the protests, but we felt we had the intellectual and ethical responsibility to demonstrate against anything that remotely conflicted with our human rights. We asked why the university wouldn’t teach us white supremacist literature about the benefits of slavery instead. The question put them to shame, and the president immediately ordered the removal of the novel from the English department’s course. We won, and we celebrated by going to the British Council’s office in Gaza to make a complaint about the novel being displayed on the library shelves. A month later, the book was removed.
But then we read Charles Dickens in our second year and suddenly it all became worthwhile. Studying an English Literature degree and paying high fees became worth it. The guy might as well have lived in Gaza. Oliver Twist broke our hearts and Hard Times just made us melt.
In 2000, the Second Intifada started, but we didn’t care – we were lost in a different world. We didn’t care that checkpoints were being erected randomly on the streets. We didn’t care that a helicopter was used to bomb us in Gaza for the first time. We didn’t care that so many of our friends were being killed. We didn’t care that F16s started firing; that the hope for peace was dwindling; that the border was shut; that electricity was scarce; that military invasions were the norm; that each time we said goodbye to family felt like the last time we would ever say it. We didn’t care because we had a world of books that was so different to everything around us, and despite the hardships in Dickens’ work we were lost in wonder at what a steam engine was or what a circus looked like.
We drew pictures of what we imagined. We read passage after passage of works of genius to get to the twentieth century and read T S Eliot. We sat in classrooms that were full of bullet holes, pretending the bombing outside was no more than the fireworks at the circus.
***
Very often, when Ammar and I sat by the sea, we would stop laughing and – without attracting too much attention – shuffle our bums so we could get closer to each other. So close that our thighs were touching. Then our hands would melt into one, all the while looking away from each other, busy scanning the area to see if anyone had noticed, pretending we were just taking in the view. We would stroke each other’s hands so gently, while staring at the glistening Mediterranean Sea ahead of us, with its gentle waves and not-so-gentle Israeli gunboats. They floated on the line where the water touched the sky, waiting to shoot any fisherman who crossed further than six miles into the sea.
When we tired of the view, we would look to the right and stare at the Mordor-like chimney exhaling thick white smoke on the other side of the fence in Asqalan port, in what’s called Israel. Watching the smoke drift in small clouds towards the sea wasn’t entertaining, but by that time we were often so aroused that we couldn’t see anything else ahead of us. Two people in love, surrounded by gunboats, watch towers and staring conservative eyes which found our touching far more offensive than the Israeli military vessels themselves.
Our game on the way back was to see how far we could get into Gaza City while still hearing the sound of the waves. We once walked back to El Rimal Park, past Kazem’s famous ice cream shop, onto the main junction of Omar El Mukhtar and El Jalaa Street, all the way up to the municipality building near El Saraya. Ammar often swore he could still hear the sound of the beach despite the noise of the street: donkeys braying; cars honking; people selling stuff, and the wonderful smell of deep fried falafel masking the stinky donkey farts as they pulled their heavily loaded carts. When I looked back at him, he was laughing, holding a seashell in his hand which he then threw at me.
‘I am not lying, you see?’ He started running ahead of me as if I was going to chase him and beat him up. I loved that man: he was my world. A different world that seemed far away from Palestine – a hundred light years away maybe. He wasn’t normal. Everything about him took me somewhere else, away from this prison, away from destruction.
He was a dreamer. Life to him was just one big dream that he never wanted to wake up from, which made him almost oblivious to the pain and sadness surrounding him.
‘So, you never threw a stone in your life? Not even a single small one at an Israeli jeep? Not one?’ I once asked him as I caressed his hand, tickling his palm while reaching out to his fingertips.
‘No,’ he said matter-of-factly, without wanting to offer any explanation – that was it, end of story. There was no reason behind it, he didn’t want to throw any stones or participate in any of the activities of the First Intifada.
‘Is it true that people in Rimal District used to pick up stones with a tissue before throwing them at the soldiers and shout “Oh naughty ones, you are so horrible!”’ I once asked him, but he just burst into laughter.
‘I don’t know, I was never there. But it’s true that we Rimal City people are a bit gentler than your Jabalia Camp folks.’ He laughed deeply, while I tickled his tummy for being so rude. There was something about his laughter that gave me comfort: it was innocent, long, deep. A man of such laughter was someone to trust and keep forever. Here was a man in front of me who had never thrown a stone in his life. I never thought I could be attracted to such a gentle human being.
My brothers at home always bragged about their muscles, and when we were kids they told me many stories of how they rained their stones on Israeli military jeeps. Resistance was sacred to them. There was no way to avoid talking about it in my household.
***
As I walked out of El Abbas police station on that cold day of December 22nd 2016, I remembered the joy we used to feel when we waited to see the big Christmas tree that always stood tall in the middle of El Rimal Public Park. It was donated by the government of Norway. Every year, two weeks before Christmas, the tree would be decorated with beautiful shiny baubles and empty boxes wrapped up like gifts. There was always a message underneath saying “A present to the Palestinian people from the Government of Norway.” Somehow that tree was our connection to the outside world – it made us part of it.
But since 2007, when Hamas took over Gaza and Israel imposed a heavy siege on this Strip, a tree hasn’t been sent. Maybe the Norwegians knew that not even Santa Claus or God could break through the Israeli siege, so they saved themselves the money and embarrassment.
Today, I walked back home alone, with no tree to look at and no Ammar to hold on to. My head was heavy, thinking of who could have murdered him. Why would anyone do that? Two years and five months had passed but it felt like it was only yesterday that Ammar left home and never returned.
The smell of sweet potatoes made me very hungry. I touched my stomach while walking past the Bank of Palestine, and took the second right, up another small hill until I got to Talatini Street. I turned left and walked all the way past the Islamic University of Gaza and the UN Headquarters where Ammar used to work as a translator. But just before I reached the front door of our building, a police car pulled up to the side of the road. Mr. Nouman got out and waved to the driver to go.
‘Zahra, could I have a word please?’
Ahmed Masoud is an award winning writer and theater director who grew up in Gaza and moved to the UK in 2002. His theatre credits include The Shroud Maker, (London 2015) which recently had a run in Chicago, and is the recipient of numerous awards . His debut novel is Vanished – The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda (2016), which is also been translated into Spanish and Italian. His second novel Come what May (Victorina Press 2022) has received favorable reviews; the Italian translation will published this coming June by Edizioni Valeria de Felice. Ahmed is the founder of Al Zaytouna Dance Theatre (2005) where he wrote and directed several productions in London, with subsequent European Tours. After finishing his PhD research, Ahmed published many journals and articles including a chapter in Britain and the Muslim World: A historical Perspective (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011)
