The Distance Between Us. Masha Hamilton
Only driftwood, of course. Crocodiles don’t live in Gaza.
This won’t work, this attempt at renewal. “Go drink the sea at Gaza,” the Palestinians say, when they mean go to hell. Why did she think she could find consolation here?
She emerges, throws the sheets over her car to block the windows and, within the car’s confines, struggles out of her wet clothing, into the dry shirt and pants. Then, instead of heading back to Jerusalem, she aims for Gaza City. She passes a Palestinian refugee camp, its plywood and aluminum shacks peeking from behind a brick wall. Few cars travel through the streets paved with stones and broken bottles. Almost on autopilot, she heads toward Hikmet Masri’s shop. She stops to see Hikmet every time she’s in Gaza. Her most reliable source, calm and articulate. Plus, he lives above his store, so she can usually find him even when it’s closed.
This time the door stands ajar. She peers inside to see the jumble of the shelves, the mix of colors and shapes crammed together as though Hikmet simply gathered whatever manna fell from heaven and dragged it in, planning to organize it all another day. Hikmet himself sits on a stool, the traditional checkered cloth draped over his head.
“Caddie! Allah blesses me in directing you here once again. What can I offer you? Today I have fresh limes and ribbons in a dozen colors. Also two volumes of a French-language dictionary and some slightly used crayons.” Then Hikmet chuckles. “Or perhaps you want only a good quote?”
He pours overheated Turkish coffee from a samovar and offers her cigarettes, which she declines. His shop smells of cardamom. She suddenly feels leaden.
“And your photographer friend?” Hikmet asks. “Where is he today?”
Only then does Caddie recall that Marcus accompanied her last time she visited Hikmet, last time she inhaled in one breath the scent of cardamom and crayon and citrus together. She tries to wet her lips, but her tongue is dry. “He’s not working anymore,” she says. Hikmet raises his eyebrows. “Sometimes this job is dangerous,” she says. “We were in Lebanon and—” She picks up buttons from a basket, rubbing her fingers over their indented surfaces, pretending to inspect them before letting them fall. “He decided he’d had enough.”
“And you continue on?” Hikmet draws on his cigarette and holds the smoke a moment before exhaling. “A man is not what he wants to be, but what he must. Sometimes, perhaps, it is the same for a woman.”
She pushes the basket of buttons aside. “What’s been happening?”
He begins to grumble about the clashes, a noose around his neck, always followed by the funerals, which require him to close his business for a day, and then there are more clashes, more dead, another funeral. A downward spiral, he says. He pauses as though to consider the colorful phrase he will come up with, the quote so perfect she won’t be able to put it any lower than the third graph. Before he can speak, though, they’re interrupted by a noise from outside. Muffled, it’s hardly louder than a generous sneeze. But they’re attuned, both of them, to sounds of a certain timbre.
Hikmet invokes Allah’s name. “Always it’s something,” he mutters as he tucks his prayer beads into his pocket and rushes to the street.
Caddie’s knees soften; her fingernails drive into her palm. There is Marcus, with his chilled, wide-eyed expression.
She pushes him off. Too heavy.
His right shoulder slams against the door of the jeep.
His head falls carelessly at an odd angle, oh God.
She tears her gaze away from him and spots Rob staring at her with something she can’t identify. Not at first. Then, sharply, she recognizes it as accusation, as if she were responsible.
She hears a woman trilling. The blast is here, in Gaza. Not Lebanon.
Notepad already in hand, she pushes through the shop’s door in time to catch an ambulance slicing up the street, and the ululating woman lifting over her head a scrap of cloth stained with blood. On the next block, a section of wall is missing from a second-floor apartment. She looks up to see a man stumbling through the building entrance carrying a girl who looks to be about ten years old. The child’s eyes are closed. Her chest and right leg are burned.
Caddie imagines this moment framed through Marcus’s lens. Woman dropping to her knees: click. Man emerging from the smoke with girl in his arms: click. Close-up of girl, delicate face above damaged body, glazed eyes half-open: click, click. It’s odd, seeing it this way—at once more focused on tiny details, and more distant from them.
Emergency workers converge on the girl, and then three men lift her into the ambulance. Others rush upstairs to the smoking apartment.
There is no surprise in the accidental explosion of a firebomb. Materials used to make such bombs in the Strip are old and unstable, and the bomb-makers themselves—kids, often—are trying to patch together deadly explosives the way they might, in another culture, use rubber cement to assemble a model airplane. Mistakes are common. Still, there might be a story.
Caddie jogs to her car and drives fast to the Strip’s main hospital. She runs up the steps, discolored with blood, and shoves open the doors. No trace of antiseptic scent lingers in the halls; instead it smells of chickpeas, sweat and mold. Women in headscarves gossip as they cook over Bunsen burners in the hallway, while children toss jacks near their feet. A knot of men under knitted caps huddle, their foreheads nearly touching. One drops a cigarette butt to the floor and grinds it with his heel. A nurse strolls past, pushing a patient in a wheelchair, his head slumped and eyes closed as he hums loudly, tunelessly. He is shushed by one of three men who sit on their haunches around a radio plugged into a hallway outlet, listening to the news.
A tall man wearing a stylish charcoal-gray tie stands awkwardly in the hallway. He is neither Palestinian nor patient, doctor nor common visitor, but clearly an outsider, like Caddie. He is taking in everything but he’s not a journalist—she’s sure from that silk tie. He meets her glance. His eyes are so dark they startle. He lifts an arm as though to stop her, to ask a question perhaps. But she hasn’t time. She glances away and moves past him.
Caddie knows from previous visits that the emergency room has been turned into nothing more than another ward: too many emergencies, too little space. Most new patients, whatever their conditions, are simply hustled into one of the large dorms. Nurses don’t waste time trying to group them according to the type or even seriousness of their ailments. A boy whose leg hangs in a cast lies next to a comatose woman hooked up to a ventilator.
Shooting through the hallways, Caddie finds the girl in a room that holds about twenty beds, all filled. She imagines some poor soul being carted to a grave minutes earlier, and the girl taking his place atop a still warm, rumpled and discolored sheet. The family is gathering: wailing women and sullen men. Caddie backs against the wall near the girl’s bed, trying for invisibility. Listening to their talk, she learns that the youth who had been making the bomb is dead. The injured girl is his sister. Her burns are severe, especially on the chest. A woman—mother or aunt—opens the child’s shirt slightly to show a red mass, skin almost gone, and what’s left looks crisp in places, leathery or wet in others. She is conscious. A moan emerges from far inside her.
A doctor arrives and begins an examination. Two weeping women are led from the room by the others, leaving three young men, probably cousins, to await the doctor’s verdict. Before he can pronounce it, a second doctor enters, two nurses on his heels. His graying hair, and the way he holds himself, make it clear he is the senior. “She should be intubated and on IV,” he tells the first doctor.
“I’ve ordered it.”
The senior doctor sends a nurse away to check on what’s become of the drip, and then examines the girl himself. He straightens. “Wait outside,” he orders the remaining relatives. He glances toward Caddie, who quickly kneels beside the unconscious patient in the next bed, her eyes closed as though praying. He turns away from her and back to the girl. “The burn penetrated the subcutaneous tissue,” he says.
“In one or two