Dice

By Gazan writer Nayrouz Qarmout, translated by Sawad Hussain and Perween Richards.

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Nayrouz Qarmout was the English PEN x The Mosaic Rooms Writer in Residence in 2021. This piece, translated by Sawad Hussain and Perween Richards, was specially commissioned as part of this residency. It is published here for the first time, on the day Nayrouz Qarmout is announced as an Honorary Member of English PEN.

~

Crossing to Gaza

Saturday morning, 8.30am

With steps noticeably light, cheeks flushed, features seemingly smaller, shirt buttons tight across his hanging middle, he advances steadily in a long line that’s burdened with luggage, with bags of all sizes and colours.

Children wear cotton pyjamas, as if they have just woken from a deep sleep. A girl watches her favourite cartoon on her mother’s mobile. An old man in filthy clothes sits in his wheelchair, begging someone to let him skip the line with his two sons. He has just had a delicate operation on his large intestine.

‘No!’ yells the man in charge of the queue. ‘You, over here. And your sons go to the back.’ One of the boys swears furiously, and the other smokes his cigarette in one breath and crushes it under his heel.

As far as the wall stretches, the line is long. Soft threads of sunlight sneak up on the faces in the queue. With his steady steps, he stands close to her. Behind him are two women; one is younger, rubbing her belly and complaining of nausea, waiting for a seed she planted. Her husband squats with his back against the wall, smacking his passport across his thigh, muttering, ‘I wish I could rip you in two.’

A faint voice says: ‘I’m going up ahead. When I turn and give you a quick wink, sprint to that gate – it opens at nine on the dot.’

Equaliser; dominoes on the table

Thursday night, 8.30pm

A Morocco goal in Algeria’s net. Shisha clouds fill the atmosphere, but it’s the frost that pricks at the warmth of those seated. One of the drivers bundles himself in a thick abaya with an eye-catching camel hue. The skin around his eyes is cracked with broad lines drawn by the scorching sun. Four others are wrapped around a table – a wooden slab raised up by rusty metal legs – dominoes lined up waiting for one of the drivers to say the word. It seems that the driver doesn’t have any say in moving unless it’s on the surface of this table. Eyes are fixed on the hanging TV screen, and the sound of a spoon stirring sugar rises with the neighing drivers, and the ball shoots through, equalising.

She keeps her pale shoes clean, wrapping one leg over the other as usual. The flush-cheeked man to her side laughs heartily when she shares a story, unsure of how true it is. ‘The Indians used magic one day to score their goals, and they’ve been banned from the game ever since.’

‘Really!’

‘So let’s say some Quranic verses over the ball and score a goal.’

They chant as one: ‘Verses or no verses, our luck’s run out!’

The driver hosting tonight’s session clinks a spoon against her tea glass. ‘More sugar for you?’

‘No, I’ve got enough thanks.’

She drinks a little tea, and takes a long drag from her shisha. She’s the only woman in the drivers’ get-together.

~

Faintly, she calls out to him. ‘Balon… Balon…’

The jeep vibrates with the melody of his snoring, laden with songs of land, sea, and air carriers. He wears a thick coat, his cheeks still rosy whenever she looks at him in the front mirror from the back seat. A dim light on the ceiling of the car breaks through the pitch-black of a cloudy night; her body trembles, she rubs her arms and legs hard – her clothes aren’t enough.

She takes a glimpse into the side mirror: burning charcoal and smoke, branches being eaten by a weak fire around which two old men sit. She trains her eyes on the fire to get warm, and remembers her mother’s words. ‘Feeling full and feeling warm, both are in the eye of the beholder, my dear.’ Still seven hours to go till dawn breaks.

But Balon is deep in sleep. After watching the match, they had walked a long way together, and bought ghee-filled layered pastry from that girl. Throughout the game her eyes had darted between the screen and this girl, wrapped in a thick rug, surrounded by packets of cigarettes, sardines, potato chips and piles of pastry, reviewing how much she’d sold. ‘I want to taste this,’ she said to him. ‘What is it?’

‘Meshaltet!’

‘I thought as much. Buy me one.’

They shared it on the way back to the car – quite a distance – which sat at the front of the queue of graves and death-trap buses moving at a leisurely pace. They called this travel. Having arrived early, they’d been able to get this position up front. Sugar sticks to their fingers. They laugh after sucking the nectar from its edges, chatting about Covid and how to avoid catching it, or any other epidemic, on this road.

‘You know, people from Gaza buy so much of this dessert,’ he had told her. ‘Whenever they go back to their country.’

Her body is still trembling, so much that even the hardness of the mountain rocks piled up can’t endure it and the night loosens its dread into the hearts of the sleepers. She can’t move anymore, the cold’s needles sunk into her joints, pricking her endlessly, taking her ability to hear, leaving her earlobes stiff. She has nothing thick and warm that isn’t packed in her carefully locked luggage.

She looks back, and it seems that there are coffins closing in on their owners. Through the windshield of the car behind her, a group of women are visible, their silence stirring up resentment in the night. An elderly man gets out of his car and paces back and forth, trying to deceive the cold. But it is of no use.

The dawn begins to whisper – to the call for prayer into the night. Balon opens his eyes. ‘You okay?’ he asks.

‘Please.’ Her voice breaks. ‘Do you have anything I can throw on myself? I’m going to die in this cold.’ She pauses. ‘Turn the heat on for a little bit.’

He turns on the heater and brings her a blanket that he has used on similar trips. She has lost all feeling in her feet.

‘I told you to let me put the cloak on your shoulders but you refused. I brought it just for you.’

‘Stop it,’ she replies immediately. ‘I hate abayas.’ They laugh together.

‘You should go on and sit with the group of women over there,’ he kids her. ‘Trust me, you’ll feel warm.’

‘I can’t take their talk right now.’ She cackles. ‘Go back to sleep, don’t worry about me.’ She falls asleep with the first signs of morning.

~

Laughter from young mouths fills the hall of an old camp with mural-covered walls. ‘How did I know it’s a camp?’ she asks herself. But silence hangs over a clothesline fastened to the wall; a plastic Coca-Cola bottle is cut, now a pot for basil; a windowless frame. Colourful children’s clothes are thrown on a rope, no clothespins to catch their scent. She can almost smell the lack of detergent in them. Scattered slogans: Resist, Fight, Strive, The storm passed by here, Freedom, Revolution Fighter, names of martyrs. She sinks among the sleeping seashells, no sound reaching them. The depths consume the truth in scenes from her memory. Still sinking, tender wheat stalks stretch upwards around her. She hides, concealed, protected by travelling verses from all the walls of life around her. The water clings to the sky, and the ears of grain are bells in the air, and are silent.

She starts to feel warm. Her face touches the edge of an embroidered robe, and a silk thread spins confusion in the stitches of this existence around her; a white shawl lowers onto her. It’s her grandmother’s face, in her hand a blue basket, from which she offers a thorned plant. As soon as she touches it, drops of blood spill from her fingertips. ‘What’s this?’ a quivering voice asks.

‘Akkub, I brought it for you from Bethlehem.’

Again she hears her mother’s voice on the phone, talking to her friend from the burning of her mother’s grave. A war on Gaza has hijacked the kitchen in her home.

She looks at her finger, the stone of her ring gleaming: a gift from her frightened friend’s mother. He had left for Bethlehem with her bag, but his mother was unable to follow. She didn’t have permission to cross.

A man grabs her hand, his beard is dark. ‘Come on then, let’s cook the porridge!’

‘No, no burbara!’ she screams. ‘I’m still trapped here, I didn’t get out, I didn’t cross.’

One image after the next: an apartment window overlooking the sea, a window facing a wall; a final window overlooking the shifting desert sands. Her body collides with the ground, her eyes open – it’s the roof of the car! ‘Will you have some coffee?’ Balon asks.

She can barely say ‘Yes. I can smell it.’

‘It’s Mood coffee. I always ask people to bring it back for me from Gaza. You finally woke up.’

‘I was in London.’ She smiles.

Friday morning, 8.30am

In one hand he has a cardboard cup of coffee, and in the other a tray of Levantine sweets, strands of hair curled into nests and stuffed with pistachio. Plastic wrap secures it in place.

‘Hey, where’d you get that from?’ she asks.

He smiles calmly. ‘At the petrol station. When you chose sandwiches to buy and then went the bathroom.’

In that moment, she asks him to wait in the supermarket. She moves animatedly, rushing to her path, to find her way back, something growing within her – it’s her longing for her homeland.

She had finally convinced him to stop at a petrol station. There, she’d gone in to buy some things. Balon had refused to stop, driving at breakneck speed. Hours passed. All he’d wanted was to get there early and make his way to the front of the long line. Once at the station, she walked out and made her way towards the shop with its elegant goods and bumped into a girl wearing a black cloak selling dessert to the cars at the petrol station. The light from a car’s front bumper reflected off her tray, the shrink-wrapped pistachios in the girl’s palm shining.

They looked at each other for a long time. They were like twins. She apologised then hurried along. Before thinking about food, she bought some sanitisers, wet wipes and water bottles. Balon caught up with her. ‘What’s all this?’

‘Please, not now. There’s still so long to go.’

As she went up to the bathroom, he placed the items at the cashier, and approached the girl to buy a tray of sweets. Unlike at most of the stops, she’d found that the bathroom was clean.

In the morning he tells her the story: ‘You know she’s a Syrian girl. She makes these sweets at home and sells them every night to those passing by the station.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m the driver and I read customers,’ he replies. ‘You would’ve sat with her for forever and we don’t have that kind of time.’

She drinks her coffee quickly, tasting a little of the Syrian girl’s dessert, while those feet start walking alongside the queue of cars – measured, heavy steps on the desert sand that make a scratching sound that pinches the cold in her rebellious insides.

‘Balon, I need to go to the bathroom.’

‘I was waiting for you to ask that.’ He smiles. ‘Let’s go.’

She opens the car door. The morning world is crowded with feet that wear different shoes; but the owners’ faces are all united in the exhaustion drawn on them. The drivers exchange crude jokes. They brighten up when they see Balon. She seems confident as they walk the road together to then cross train tracks to an old building on a side street. As usual, Balon is joking all the way; her hair agitates, revealing a clash from the night before.

‘Screw you Balon. You made me eat and drink this time, not like my last journey.’

‘How else would you pass the time then? Don’t tell me you’re in the mood for reading.’

‘How could I read now? Our journey is more than enough for others to read about.’

He looks at her cautiously. ‘Don’t you dare write about it.’

She looks at him in silence. ‘What? I got it, I got it. Don’t worry it’s just the bathroom.’

The driver in a camel-coloured cloak teases, ‘Balon you’ve filled out!’ Balon chuckles. All the drivers fear him – even the older ones. Daylight reveals coal ash dressing the corners of the motorised coffins. Spaces extend on both sides of the street, scattered with a few trees, behind which the intentions of foxes lurk, their shadows fleeing in the dead of night, destroying any illusions, wondering if they have managed to capture their prey. Darkness recedes, the last pages of night folded away. A man relieves himself, hidden behind the wheel of a car; the door of an medium-sized minibus opens while a mother changes her child’s diaper on one of its seats; a teenage girl applies lipstick in the side mirror, matching the hijab of a woman who is still carefully wrapping it, its burgundy colour more elegant still.

Climbing three steps, they reach the building. A white cat, brushed with grey, rummages through rubbish bags at the open door to a room where mattresses lie on the floor. A child is still asleep on one of them. As she enters, she finds some old-fashioned sofas and worn-out beds. ‘This way!’ Balon gestures.

‘What?’ she replies.

‘It’s the bathroom,’ he says.

She makes her way to it. Tissues are scattered on the floor – it’s far from clean. She tries in one way or another to relieve herself. She stands in front of the dimly light mirror, looks at her face, and decides she won’t wash it. ‘I don’t feel the need to,’ she says to herself.

She washes her hands then opens the door. Balon is waiting for her outside. ‘Wait for me,’ he says.

‘I’m waiting,’ she replies quietly. How much patience that road needed.

A friend had mentioned that this place was rented to families waiting for the ferry for 150 LE a night. The ferry that cuts through a canal, which throughout history has been the added value in the starting of civilisations.

‘Let’s wait for the train. It comes through here every morning.’ Balon seems happy about this fact. ‘You know, I haven’t set foot in Gaza in eleven years. I miss it.’

They make their way to the car again. The weather suddenly turns, getting increasingly hot. The sun shoots its rays to weaken the limbs of already-tired children, rendering them unable even to play. The sound of weeping fills the place. An old man groans, complaining of a phantom pain; wives complain to their husbands of being tired and the queues grow, the waiting endless. ‘A thousand passengers today,’ someone tells the driver, while two other drivers are bickering.

‘You stole my spot when I was sleeping,’ he accuses him, all while those measured steps fire shots into the sky.

‘Get back in your cars!’

She hardly remembers anything; the mists of memory catch up with her as the mirror darkens and her vision blurs. Her eyes widen to grasp the shadows of parallel worlds. The car descends into darkness and falls into a tunnel, the rain thickens, the desert collapses. Al-Najashi’scane of justice taps the ebony-covered floor. The pattern – inlaid mother-of-pearl triangles – is a mirror, reflecting the path of the delta’s flow and the birth of new species, new life.

‘Who believes in the game?’ he cries out. The strands of her hair are flying, and Balon’s cheeks are flushed. Droves of people in black abayas are queuing. It’s the Syrian girl who makes the sweets, the man who sold her the sandwiches, the driver who stirred the sugar in her cup, that other man who exchanged his camel abaya for a black one, the elderly man who wanders at night, the teenaged girl applying lipstick, the other woman slowly wrapping her hijab, and others – they all live in those mirrored triangles. He repeats his cry, ‘Who believes in the dice snake? The Nile is najashi brown, and it longs for its snake and the water of its homeland.’

‘No, we’ve strayed too far. We need to cross the canal to my country.’ She cries out.

He ignores her cries. ‘The dice has six faces.’ He strides towards her.  She is sitting alone in the cafe, the screen showing a goal being scored. The smoke from her shisha rises. He continues addressing her: ‘You know, the dice has six faces. The first face is a snake that does not release its venom but eats fish and small frogs. The second face is a grain of wheat that will protect Saint Barbara, and the third is an Akkub thorn that will ease the pain between two cities. The fourth a bite of meshaltet to create goodwill between a desert and a sea. The fifth face is the Aleppo pistachio that takes the Syrian girl to the station, the sixth a brown foot that brings you to the Nile.

‘Snake (first face) + Brown Foot (sixth face) = the snake will return home to the Nile to devour all the fish and frogs he desires.

‘Grain of Wheat (second face) + Aleppo Pistachio (fifth face) = Saint Barbara will be protected, and the Syrian girl will arrive at the station.

‘Akkub (third face) + Meshaltet (fourth face) = the pain between two cities will be eased, bringing goodwill to the sea and the desert.

‘You must choose between feeding an animal, protecting two women, and bringing peace to two cities and two natures. Look at the total sum of the faces, every choice equals seven steps, either forwards or backwards. In the end, it’s either the Nile or the canal. Over there is life and back there is a Return.’

Everyone is exhausted. They start snapping at each other. Most of them chose life. She remains silent. His cane taps the ground. ‘Silence.’ He goes on, ‘In 24 hours you will give me your answer.’

She opens her eyes and they rest on the car window. The pressure in her ears is overwhelming. The buses are lining up, and the sound of a metal plate vibrating under the weight of its wheels resembles a hungry lion’s roar. Her chest tightens; she can’t breathe. The car is filling up with sand. She can feel it in her teeth. And her throat is filling up with water, and she clings to the dress of an Egyptian farmer and paddles her torch to the surface. The fire does not fade.

The cane slashes the belly of the water, the blood of countless workers gushes out into the canal, and the helmets of soldiers cling to the abyss. The bodies are hiding from her. The farmer is trying to float to the surface. A lifeless military uniform throws luggage from the top of a shipping container loaded with people, burning an unjust history. Land swallows up the river water in an unnatural way, leaving humanity to wonder if the Statue of Liberty can ever return home from New York to Egypt, a trophy of a saint’s revolutionary promise.

Everything is on fire, even her insides. ‘I need to breathe.’

‘Patience, it’s the canal. We’re between two seas,’ Balon says.

Floating cities with Chinese script on their sides go past. ‘Which sky are we in? Seventh heaven?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ he replies. They keep going, falling into the arid desert of the 1,000 passengers.

She wakes as she climbs the steps at the top of the tunnel: Oxford Street underground station, London. Loud music is playing as she walks out. She stands at the top of the stairs and slowly breathes in the priceless air that smells like freedom. She wonders if everyone around her shares her sense of freedom after being suffocated in the underground for mere minutes. Reaching the top of the staircase opens the door to a world of well-heeled, fashionable shoes that have trampled all over the world in the quest for ‘civilisation’.She can smell the smell of empire-building wafting from the marble buildings, stones telling the stories of past glory.

Twilight engulfs the pink sky, people of all different colours and shapes walking past her. Everyone is wearing something else; different fabrics and materials, cheap and expensive all at the same time. Everything has its own charm. Everything seems too fast. But she still remains trapped in her own reality. She picks up the pace, walking faster on the pavement,but her feet feel heavy. The storefronts are drawing in the crowds, and the city is screaming with signs of life. But she can’t hear it. She pleads with the city, ‘London, wipe away my sorrow. Absorb my anxiety, my pain. Do not abandon me. Do not abandon my joy.’

The window returns – the window opposite a wall closing in on her imagination. She sits nearby, writing some words. She looks up and glimpses part of a cloud and a tree whose leaves are heavy with raindrops, and pedestrians’ feet walking by her basement flat on 226 Cromwell Street.

She grips the mug of hot tea and takes a sip. She’s listening to music and trying to stay warm. But no heat could calm the anxiety in her.

In contrast, in the noise and chaos of the city she found the calm she needed – not like the constant hum that occupies her memory, her imagination, that’s still stuck on a mural-covered wall in a refugee camp, where a man with a dark beard reached for her hand to cook the burbara, and where her mother’s voice called to remind her of the Akkub thorn and the saint in Bethlehem.

~

She opens her eyes and queues of people rush to a window from which they’re selling chicken sandwiches. The cars are too close together, exhaustion drawn on their faces, and the rocky mountains envelop people in a spot in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a concrete well. ‘We’ve arrived at the Maydan roadblock.’ Balon tells her. ‘You’re finally awake.’

She can’t bring herself to smile. ‘I was back in London.’

The day passes, and a violent storm carries them on their way. Balon is driving the car at breakneck speed; a few times, it jumps up and their heads hit the roof. There are several barriers along the way: bags filled with sand, stones, and question marks. Their bags were searched several times, by old hands, young hands, rough hands. The wind carries the sand to chase their window and the salt to the edge of the street, a natural stop sign. The sky turns white, and the plants disappear, and so do the signs of a possible life.

Cement blocks with shut windows are interspersed on one side of the road. These were built by the government, for the families of the victims of a terrorist attack. A mosque and everyone inside it was blown up, and the people were compensated with these small houses. Balon talks at length about terrorists and smugglers.

She had asked him several times to stop at a gas station, but he refused because he wanted to arrive early. He had to stick to his plan at any cost. The goal was too precious to risk getting lost in the depths of the desert. She insists and asks him again, ‘I need to go to the bathroom!’

Now he quickly replies, ‘Let’s go.’ They get out of the car and cross the military checkpoint to use their bathroom.

She lets out a scream as soon as she opens the door. ‘What is this?’ Dried urine forms a thick layer that covers the bathroom floor. Her foot slips in a still pool, on whose surface swarms of flies gather. You can’t tell which faction they belong to.  ‘What is this filth?’ she mutters to herself. She walks out. This place broke something inside her. She was starting to crack. A voice murmurs, ‘It’s the call of the return–it purifies the soul and washes away all its impurities, no matter how intertwined.’

The soldier standing by the barrier gives her a scrutinising look. ‘What’s wrong with you? You need something?’

She doesn’t say anything. She just walks through the barrier. Balon follows her. ‘What happened?’ he asks.

‘I told you we should’ve stopped somewhere else before the checkpoint. They’re punishing themselves, not us,’ she shouts. He tries to calm her down. She yanks the car door open and takes the bottled water. She pours it onto her shoes and then scrubs them with sand three times. Anger is eating her up inside.

She begins to remember the dog Balon had run over while he was speeding. And there was also the woman on the road whom he refused to give a ride to when her car ran out of petrol. He had shut his humanity off twice, just to go on his way.

He needs to connect the desert and the sea – to bring peace to two cities.

Night again, and the pale-yellow lights on the road are waning. She is completely exhausted, and Balon is getting increasingly tense the closer they get to their destination. He calms down for a moment and turns to her. ‘We’ll go spend the night at my aunt’s house.’

She interrupts him. ‘No, just take me to any gas station.’

‘Not happening. I’m a man and I can’t accept that.’ 

She laughs sarcastically. ‘You ran over a dog and left a woman stranded in the desert.’

‘No arrival without sacrifice; think of them as an offering to the desert sands.’ 

They enter a narrow passage. He parks the car and opens a metal gate. Climbing three steps, they reach the entrance and pull back a curtain that opens onto a simple living room where worn-out rugs are scattered on the floor. His aunt Sabah, a kind woman who shares her mother’s name, has cooked her dinner; a grilled chicken, no less.

‘I’m sorry but I can’t eat anything right now,’ she says. ‘I’m just so tired.’ She lies down on one of the sofas. ‘Please let me sleep here.’ There, she receives a visitation from a believer, who whispers in her ear, You killed the saint of the desert, you let go of the Akkub thorn, the wheat no longer grows. How will you ease the pain between two cities? You have cut the cord that connects two natures.

‘Not me!’ she screams. She wakes up and the sound of her coughing fills the room. The aunt holds her. She brings her some sandwiches and juice from the fridge in the middle of the room. The fridge looks like the ones they sell goods out of in shops. Sabah’s house must also be a place of business. They stay up together, eating and talking. ‘My son disappeared for many years. Later we found out that he had been in prison. He joined one of those cells,’ she complained.

She was filled with questions about these cells. Was death tailor-made to fit their size, or did they fashion death in their own image? They creep into crevices and lay in wait, suddenly appearing when ideals, places, and resources cause division. Even the individual self is divided: we contain within us two separate entities that are unclear, separate and contradictory. But their death is not natural, doesn’t fuel history or feed the soil; it uproots plants, and pollutes the fertility of the land.

They talk about their respective areas, Gaza and Sinai, until she falls back asleep. ‘I’ll wake you up at the dawn prayer so you can leave early,’ Sabah whispers.

Saturday morning

She wakes up to the feeling of dew on her eyelids. Sabah has woke her up at dawn. She washes her face with a little water, puts on her shoes and her coat, and pulls her damp hair back in a ponytail. Balon helps her carry her bags back to the car. A group of young men, their neighbours, are busy carrying red bricks, trying to finish building their house. A new life begins. Bricks made of Nile mud, burned for the sake of isolating others. The desert saga of red brick houses that burn in summer and stay cool in winter.

Balon, still flushed, brightens everyone’s day here. The music he plays in the car alternates: current music, then older music, from before the Arab Spring and the years that passed too quickly since then, and then current music again. ‘You listen to my favourite songs, even though you’re about ten years younger than me!’ He seems relieved.

‘Yes, I like the rhythm.’ They both fall silent.

‘Look at those high-rise buildings.’ he points. She looks and at the same time sees a medium-sized truck carrying workers piled on top of each other, their keffiyehs wrapped around their head, their faces tanned, their shoes torn.

‘Who are these high-rises for?’ she asks.

‘We don’t know,’ he chuckles. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and live there!’ Their laughter rises with the sound of the music.’

He is still driving fast; it seems that other cars have overtaken them. He stops, gets out of the car, then almost immediately gets back in and drives back past them. ‘What did you do?’ she asks.

‘Some problems can only be solved this way,’ he says.

He’s probably paid someone off. They stop at another checkpoint, where the soldier inspects the contents of a single bag. He opens it and looks surprised to find it filled with books: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, Elif Shafak’s The Three Daughters of Eve, The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris, Identity by Milan Kundera, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Balon approaches the soldier and whispers something in his ear. She turns around and looks out the rear windshield. The inspection continues and the soldier peeks into her window. She watches a group of soldiers sitting around a table, having breakfast while the queue behind them gets longer and the bags waiting for inspection linger. Balon shuts the trunk. She turns towards him, ‘Any other checkpoints to go through?’

‘Probably not,’ he replies. The car is still beset by the choice of going onwards or turning back.They have crossed the canal, and the road to the city by the sea gets longer, testing her imagination.

‘There were so many trees here – olive, peach, even almonds. They uprooted them, the water no longer reaches this part of the land anymore.’ It’s Balon playing tour guide of the mysterious desert sands – well, a guide that only tells her what he wants to relay.

‘Imagine if this desert were green. A green, peaceful route to our city,’ she says.

‘The military barracks protect our children in the city. My wife and I are expecting a baby girl, you know,’ Balon says.

She looks out of the window, and one image after the next from her recent memories comes to mind. An elderly man lying on the ground, surrounded by broken glass. Fourteen people crammed into a seven-seater Peugeot. The old man’s feet are right up in a little girl’s face, which is lit by the moon; the girl freezes with terror in the middle of the night. She goes forwards and backwards. All night long the sounds of gunfire and the howling of dogs echo in the desert’s cold air. She finds herself copying the older man’s movements – the one who has returned from Kuwait after thirty years, after his wife died, who keeps pacing, trying to keep warm. A soldier shoots the ground by her feet, and another man shouts at her, ‘You have to sit down!’ But she can’t sleep, not until morning, when she collapses into a deep sleep, resting her forehead on the back of the seat in front of her.

This was after she had left the private car she rented for herself. She had realised that the driver had no hope of getting to the front of the queue, and she simply did not have the serenity to stay in this motorised coffin. So she paid him and dragged her bags out of the car and paid for half a seat in another car that was in the front of the queue. Otherwise, she would have spent another week in the wilderness. In the car, there was barely room to move. She had to sit with her legs contorted for hours. The heat of the afternoon intensified, and it felt like the sun was burning off everyone’s eyelids. They were dripping with sweat, so much so that the little girl’s hair was wet with it. Blisters devoured their skin, and a plastic bottle in the driver’s armrest melted in the heat. There is no mercy in forgetting. 

A faint voice says: ‘I’m going up ahead. When I turn and give you a quick wink, sprint to that gate – it opens at nine on the dot.’

She starts running, a young man is running alongside her too, and he helps her with her bags. The officer behind the gate is smiling. She is out of breath as she enters the waiting room to stamp her passport with an arrival visa. The room is still dark.

---

Nayrouz Qarmout is a journalist, author and women’s rights campaigner. Born in Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Damascus, in 1984, as a Palestinian refugee, she was ‘returned’ to the Gaza Strip at the age of 11 as part of the 1994 Oslo Peace Accord, where she now lives. She has worked in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, raising awareness of gender issues and promoting the political and economic role of women in policy, law, and the media. She has won a number of prizes including the Creative Women’s Award for her debut collection The Sea Cloak, which was the bestseller at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2019.