The Thousand-Yard Stare

A blazing white sun beat down on Al-Khuwair, a dense, gray, concrete shantytown in Gaza, surrounded on three sides by Israeli military positions. Samira, wearing a damp robe and shoes covered with dust, limped across the Yusuf Street in the El Katadwa neighborhood. She had a photo-frame clutched under her arm. After waiting for more than a week, she could finally get the frame from the frame-maker’s shop. For over a month, she was saving her pocket money for this memento. Initially she had thought of asking her father for the money, but she was old enough to realize that her father had suffered heavy losses in his business. The other day she eavesdropped on her father telling her mother how one truckload of his tomatoes got damaged because the Israeli authorities had held the truck for a whole day, the tomatoes exposed to the blistering sun.

Samira hurried her steps through the concrete maze. She was late from school and her mother would begin to worry. From a distance, she looked at the dunes enfolding the camp. The dunes were dotted on top with Israeli gun emplacements, sandbagged bunkers, bulky concrete slabs, and a snaking electric fence. Armored green jeeps and tanks roared and clanked along the fence’s perimeter, throwing up clouds of dust. She stopped for a moment and gazing at the dunes, thought: this was where Ali became a martyr. She again took a look at the picture frame, and her eyes moistened. Then thrusting it back under her arm, she quickened her walk.

Samira carefully maneuvered her way through the frothy black waters from sewers, running in thin rivulets down the middle of the alley. Flanking the lane, vendors sold roasted corn on the cob or falafel in small, squalid stalls. Hunks of meat hung on enormous hooks, alongside wooden tables piled with tomatoes, potatoes, and green peppers. She was also careful about the crude septic tanks that lay outside houses, covered only by a thin coating of sand.

She moved along the walls of the houses facing the settlements, pockmarked with bullet holes. Jagged lumps of masonry, slashed away by tank fire, lay on the alley. She turned down a crowded alley and came upon a group of older men seated on chairs playing backgammon. Looming over them were a black plastic water tank and a TV antenna. Arabic music wafted off a radio, perched on a window ledge behind metal bars.

She came across a small yard filled with children—some of them were her age; others were younger than her. They ran around barefoot with their dirty faces. They moved in aimless bands throughout the camp, scavenging, swearing obscenities, smoking cigarette butts, and getting into rock-throwing wars. They were the children of poor Palestinians. The wealthier people kept their kids indoors. Two emaciated donkeys with protruding ribs were tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels.

She stopped before her house: a run-down structure, like most of the concrete shacks in the camp. Its roof mostly consisting of asbestos; held down by piles of rocks, cement blocks, and old tires. Before going inside, she shoved the photo frame into her school bag. When she entered, her mother who was baking bread gave her a furious glance.

“Where were you, Samira? Your friends from school came a long while ago,” she said, the lines on her forehead puckered and her head covered with a scarf.

“Mother, I was discussing a problem with the teacher.”

“Discussing with the teacher!” her mother muttered. “I was worried. So I sent your father to look for you in the school. Did you see him?”

“No mother,” she said.

Samira, fearing further interrogation, darted inside the room. She kept her satchel on the desk. She took out the frame and looked at it for a while.

“Where have you gone Ali?” she mumbled innocently. “I miss you a lot.”

“What are you doing Samira?” she heard her mother scream from outside.

“Nothing mother,” she replied.

She put the frame back and came out, almost running with her limp.

“Want me to help you mother?”

“No, no. Just go wash yourself and have your lunch.”
Samira nodded and went away to wash herself inside a tented bathroom. The water was brown and brackish but she was used to it. Since water was scarce, she took ablutions with a great economy.

After lunch, Samira went to the bed for a nap. If father comes, he’d rebuke me, she thought. Better to go to sleep than remain waken for father’s chiding, she told herself and lay down on the bed. The heat was oppressive inside the room and the fan was not working because there was no electricity.

Samira closed her eyes for a while and lay motionless. She could not sleep at all. Her mind was more and more invaded by the thoughts of the frame. How beautiful it was, she thought. A few of her classmates had got such frames made for their brothers. She too wanted one for her brother Ali. Today she was very proud that she had got one for herself. She felt an urge to see the frame again. She got up from her bed and took out the frame from her school bag. She scanned it closely. It was a steel frame with shiny, decorated edges. Under the glass, in a round cut, Ali smiled his innocent smile. She had seen Ali’s face in red and green posters pasted on the walls, amid several other faces of young martyrs. But that was on the walls. Now, with this picture frame, Ali was with her—permanently.

She remembered her brother. Her heart pined for him. She felt as if Ali was out of the house and would soon call her out asking her to come out and play.

She did not realize when she fell asleep, the frame in her hands under the pillow. In her sleep, she was dreaming about Ali. She was playing with him around the dunes, along with many other kids.

It was still. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackled over a loudspeaker.
“Come on, dogs," the voice boomed in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Al Khuwair? Come here for chocolates and money! Come!"

Samira and Ali, like other children, were taken aback. The voice further boomed: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother’s cunt!"

The boys darted in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separated the camp from the Jewish settlement. As an automatic reaction, they lobbed rocks toward two jeeps equipped with loudspeakers parked on top of the dune.

A percussion grenade exploded. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily across the heavy sand. There were no sounds of gunfire as the soldiers shot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles pierced through the children’s slight bodies. Ali clutched Samira’s hand and ran. A bullet razed Samira’s right leg and she fell down on the ground, unconscious.

When Samira came to her sense, she found herself on a hospital bed. She had one of her legs wrapped in heavy white bandages. She felt pain under the stifling tightness of the dressing. She could not even move her leg. There were other children around her who lay on other beds, their different body parts bandaged, crying and sighing. But she could not find Ali among those around her. She got worried for him.

When her parents came, she asked for Ali. Her mother burst into tears, and her father, took her tiny hand in his palm.

“Ali has gone to Allah, Samira,” he said.

“Why did he go to Allah?”

“Because He wanted him. He wanted to make him a martyr.”
Samira could not understand it, but later when she could walk again, with a limp though, she saw Ali’s face in posters on the mosque walls. Amid the Koranic verses and long lines, she could read his name: Ali Abdel Rahman, Martyr. There were other faces too. She could read their names. Aadel Hussein al-Muqannan, Martyr. Abid Hussein al-Muqannan, Martyr. Murad Ali Yusuf, Martyr.

Samira knew what she had missed. She had missed Ali the Martyr’s funeral procession. She had seen the funeral of other martyrs, so she knew what they looked like: trucks with mounted loudspeakers that tour the camp. Black flags of mourning. Green banners with Koranic verses. The yellow flags of the Fatah militia. A cadre of young men, some bearded and in robes, others dressed in black and wearing wraparound sunglasses, marching in rows, with automatic weapons pointed in the air, behind the bier. The crowd of several hundred, egged on by the speakers mounted on the truck, chanting Islamic and anti-Israeli slogans.

"Mothers of Jews!"

"We will make you weep like Palestinian mothers."
Samira felt her body shake and a bout of pain rendering her leg.

“Samira! Samira!”

Samira opened her eyes. Her mother was bent over her, waking her up. Her father was standing behind her.

“Samira! Get up! Father wants to speak to you.”

She got up and sat in the bed. The picture frame was still in her hand, which she had hidden beneath the pillow.

“Where were you Samira? Why were you late from school?” her father asked her.

“I was talking with the teacher,” Samira said, ducking her eyes from her father’s.

“But your teacher said you left on time!”

“No, I was…”

“Don’t tell a lie Samira,” her mother interrupted. “Tell us where were you?”

“What are you hiding there? Show us!” her father said, pointing towards the frame, which was partly beneath the pillow.

Samira began to cry. Her mother took the picture frame and put her hand back beneath the pillow. She looked at it for a while. Her eyes began to brim with tears. She passed the frame to her husband and covering her face with her hands began to sob. The father looked at the picture and then at a crying Samira. He suddenly had this thousand-yard stare of despair in his eyes.

“Did you go to get this?” he asked.

“Yes Father,” said a sobbing Samira.

“Oh, my child,” said the father, and took Samira in his arms.

End