The Unseen
by LENA MAHMOUD
in Fall 2018
Terico Harper, "Sacks on Sacks On," 2014
Abu Shusha, Palestine
1920
Though many people thought of me as strange and more concerned with the invisible world of the jinn, I didn’t like human beings who were unfamiliar to me. I was unlike my parents, who used to eagerly seek out strangers, mostly British officials surveying the land or monitoring their soldiers. A few of those scouts were adventurous enough to spend the night and eat with us, as eager for the knowledge of the “Palestinian peasant” as my parents were for the tales from abroad.
But with my older sister Yasmeen, her husband Ahmad, and baby son Muhammad living with us, we had no room for extras in the house anymore. Yasmeen and her husband had first lived with his parents when they married, but his family had been evicted from the land that they had worked for centuries when it was sold and remade into something called a kibbutz, a big farm Jewish settlers ran. His parents and the rest of his family went to live with relatives in Ramallah, but Yasmeen wanted to stay close, so they came back to our house. She gave birth to Muhammad soon after.
But even with so much family around—my parents, my sister’s family, and my little brother Rami—sometimes I craved the company of people who would listen to me instead of speak at me or tease me, so I would sit on our doorstep and talk to the jinn.
Of course, other people encountered them and spoke of their experiences with a mixture of excitement, fear, and pride. It was always a brief, mysterious exchange, too: the door swung open for no reason; a full tea kettle had somehow been emptied; or the donkeys brayed too long.
But I didn’t think the jinn were like that, flitting around and making small disturbances in our lives or possessing our bodies. They had lives of their own, families to take care of, and work to do, but occasionally they wanted contact with the people who lived alongside them but did not see them. They wanted to know about my life—what I was embroidering with Yama and Yasmeen, the fights I had with my brother Rami, the way I loved my nephew Muhammad opening his arms to me before I swaddled him, and how sometimes we could only eat once a day when we had a bad harvest.
I usually spoke to them at twilight, that time it was half-light, half-dark, because I could still see what was in front of me, and I thought the jinn, who were made of fire, would be more visible in the dark. Still, I never managed to see more than a faint outline of them, a glowing shape I wanted to reach out and touch. But if I did, they might flee and never come back.
I still lost the jinn though. I was nine years old, and my parents believed I was too old to be sitting on doorsteps and talking to myself like a majnoona for all our neighbors to see. Besides, with the settlement so close, it was too dangerous to be outside at night.
***
We would be one less now: Baba was going to leave with one of his younger cousins from Mount Lebanon for the United States. I could tell that Yama and Baba had been discussing something secret for the last few months; they would tell Rami and I to play outside with our friends, and still their voices remained low and guarded.
Baba announced the news during our big mansaf dinner, the first time we had had meat—lamb, my favorite—this year. It seemed that Ahmad already knew because he sat there calmly as Baba explained that he would be the one to watch over us because Rami was only seven.
Yasmeen howled her disapproval, unconcerned that she had just put Muhammad to sleep. “America! Why are you going to live among more of the franji?”
Baba explained patronizingly that it was the British and the Jewish settlers who were invading our homeland, not the Americans. “In America, there are more protections for our property, our homes,” he said. “Many men have worked a few years there and come back richer than any of the British or the settlers here.”
“Christian men,” Yasmeen corrected. “How will you find work there if you have nothing in common with them?”
But Baba seemed capable of making friends with anyone; I knew that from when we used to have foreign guests over. He knew a reasonable amount of English, picked up from British officials who knew a little Arabic, and I often saw how a once condescending and cold guest would begin telling my father about some of the most personal details of his life in a mixture of English and Arabic—why he left his family behind for such a long period of time, disagreements with his wife, or a difficult child who brought shame to the family.
Yama also came to Baba’s defense. “We have hardly been able to feed ourselves since the British and the settlers came.”
“That’s why we have to fight! They have to know that we won’t leave.” That seemed to be take the last of Yasmeen’s strength because she covered her face and began weeping as the baby woke up with a cry.
Ahmad tried to comfort Yasmeen, reassuring her that our problems would soon be over. She got up and turned her back to him and gathered the baby in her arms.
Baba didn’t let it go at that though. “This will not pass,” he said. “This land has never been ours in my lifetime.”
That set both Ahmad and Yasmeen off on Baba, which made Muhammad wail louder, and Yama tried unsuccessfully to calm everyone down. Rami and I just sat there, still and silent, letting our food grow cold for the first time.
***
Later that night, an uncomfortable silence took over our home, and Baba sat alone by the fire, his head in his hands. I looked over at our front door, tempted to leave and meet with the jinn; everyone except Rami and Muhammad was so locked in their own anger and resentment that they probably wouldn’t notice my departure.
I wondered if the jinn would follow Baba to the United States, or if some of them were already there. They didn’t have the same restrictions that we did; most people could not detect their presence, and because they didn’t have bodies to care for, they could float quickly from place to place.
They could tell me about Baba’s life in America, which might make it more understandable. People said it was a place to make riches, but if Americans had big houses and full bellies, then why did some of these Jewish settlers leave that and come here to make new homes? Instead of going to the doorstep, I went to Baba with this question.
He shook his head. “Ya Manal, America is such a vast place, and Europe, too. They are not the same. Some parts are not so good for the Jews, and they want a country only for themselves. Because we are weak, because the British are willing, they are trying to take this land.”
“But why are we weak here and they aren’t?”
Baba shrugged. “I don’t know these things, Manal. Maybe it is all the foreign occupation; maybe it’s God’s will.”
Baba’s resignation to our condition only made me feel more afraid. I heard that word, “weak,” repeat over and over in my head. It felt like each time it peeled a bit more of my skin off, and now my raw flesh was exposed for anyone to take a piece.
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. My head was full of images of what I imagined America to be. I hadn’t seen any photos or paintings, but I did remember hearing about the tall buildings and the giant Statue of Liberty from one of our British visitors who had traveled to the United States before.
And it felt like the settlement a few yards away had moved closer since this evening, like they had hidden weapons pointed at us at all times.
I knew that I shouldn’t sneak outside, that it would only make me more vulnerable, but I had to speak to the jinn about America and the encroaching settlement, so I walked softly and slowly and nudged the front door open. The cold hit me instantly, my teeth chattering and my body shivering. I wrapped my arms around myself for warmth.
I didn’t hear the jinn. I didn’t see them. I thought for a minute that the world was shaking, but it was my own body moving to make everything appear uprooted and out of place.
***
In the three years without Baba, I had frequent nightmares, the embodiments of the worries and fears that I managed to keep in the back of my mind when I was awake. They were all variations of the same thing: the armed Jewish militia breaking into our home, destroying our crops, and beating us all until we were bloody and swollen.
I never told anyone about them. Yama was concerned enough about Baba’s well-being in America, and Yasmeen about how we—Yama, Rami, and I—would follow Baba there.
She and Ahmad refused to come with us.
But even though my fear had intensified here I still could never imagine myself in the United States. I couldn’t fathom living in a place where you didn’t know how to do the simplest things like walk in a shop and ask for what you wanted in a way that the store clerk could understand, where you had to decipher the language and the practices instead of knowing them intuitively.
And America seemed to be great only for men. No one told me that, but I realized what was left unmentioned was at least as important as what was, and I never heard about women opening their own businesses and making piles of money. They went along to the United States and supported their husbands’ endeavors and bore their children. Just like here. I saw no need to cross an ocean and learn a new language for what was essentially the same life.
Yama tried to convince us that it would be an adventure, being in a new setting meeting new people, but I didn’t believe her: the soldiers and the settlers were new, and all they brought was trouble.
***
The Friday after my parents’ decision Yama went to visit one of her friends and Ahmad and Rami were at the mosque, so Yasmeen and I sat underneath one of our trees while Muhammad played, enjoying the last of the spring breeze. She adjusted her hijab, making sure it was on properly, even though no one else was around.
“You know, Manal, you have to be careful in America,” she said suddenly. “Baba and Yama, they’re . . . ” She paused, one of the few times I saw her at a loss for words. Normally, she was ready with a retort or an apt description. “They’re good parents, but they’re foolish, thinking the best of people when they should know better. And don’t go around searching for jinn while you’re there.”
I looked down at the dirt I was tracing shapes in and sighed. “I haven’t done that for years.” Or at I hadn’t been able to successfully find any in that time.
“I just want to make sure. You have to look out for yourself. Baba and Yama think almost like children.” She went on criticizing Baba, an old man with a family, leaving for America like he was a young one with no obligations. “What would have happened to you guys if Ahmad wasn’t here to protect us? And remember how they would let those British men stay in the house when you were young? Yama even used to talk to the Jewish women until people started gossiping about her.”
I didn’t know how to react to what Yasmeen was saying. I resented Baba and Yama for feeding those British officials so much, depleting our supplies nourishing well-fed men. But I didn’t understand why Yasmeen would begrudge Yama so much just for talking to Jews. All she was giving away was her conversation, and she had plenty of that to spread around. “Baba and Yama are just too nice. To foreigners at least.” I motioned in the direction of the settlement near us.
Yasmeen shook her head. “They don’t understand what’s around them. They only believe the world is how they imagine it.”
But it seemed like Yasmeen recreated the world in her head, imagining minor things as being much more terrible than they really were. While my family chastised me for chasing and befriending jinn, they were all wrapped in their own delusions.
I sighed, wishing that I could be invisible and float away from my family.
Then Yasmeen reached out and put her arm around me, pulling me in close so that our damp cheeks touched.
***
Once we left, I often forgot that we had a destination in mind; we moved so much that when I woke up it usually took me a moment to remember where we were. Though I hated the alternating exertion, tedium, and adjustment, eventually my stamina for travel developed with time. I hadn’t had much practice. Before, a long trip was visiting Al-Aqsa or the suq in Jerusalem, places that I could now only vaguely remember in the swirl of settings we lived in during those months.
We stayed with some of Baba’s cousins in Saadnayel on Mt. Lebanon much longer than we expected, waiting on our ship to come. In the meantime Yama and I sewed and embroidered dresses to sell while Rami played and made friends with other boys in the village. Yama and I were at work nearly the whole day, and by the end of it, my back and fingers ached like an old woman. When I tried to stay in bed longer or linger at the small breakfast spread in the morning, enjoying the easy effort of keeping my eyes closed or chewing food, Yama would say, “Ya Manal, if you don’t help me right now, I’ll send you to Beirut to work in a silk factory!”
Sometimes one of my aunts or cousins would help us for a little while, but Yama always steered them to the easier embroidery designs. They only made dresses or scarves for themselves; they never had to sell what they made before. But they were usually good company, and they nearly always had a fresh batch of gossip that would distract me from the pain quaking in my fingers.
Though Saadnayel was a village like Abu Shusha, it seemed almost as cosmopolitan as Jerusalem. My extended family knew Shias, Christians, and even Jews, and while they sometimes criticized or laughed at them, they didn’t seem to be fear or hate them. I could imagine Yasmeen’s suspicious eyes squinting, her head cocked at the ways of our family that she had never met.
***
And that time seemed like heaven compared to traveling on the ship. It was like entering a completely different universe, and in the delirium of the first week’s seasickness, I believed that this had to be the hellfire that I had heard so much about. We rocked continuously back and forth; we couldn’t understand the languages of those around us; the light was so dim all the time; and the smell of rotten food and excrement was so pervasive I thought it would seep into our skin and stay with us forever.
We had a short respite when the ship docked in France for a couple of weeks. Though the buildings and cobbled streets were nothing like Abu Shusha, I felt at home being on the ground once again. The boarding house we stayed in was nearly as crowded as the steamship, but at least here there was an exit where I could walk out and breathe the air outside.
Though Yama allowed Rami to stay out until sunset, she tried to keep me inside even though we had no sewing or embroidery to do. The people she saw in the streets irked her, the way they looked at us, our long hair and full-length dresses that were so different from their short hair and short dresses, but I wouldn’t let her keep me from what I wanted to do, the way she had done with the jinn and in Saadnayel. Keeping me around as a sort of anchor, a way to hold on to a bit of home when it was she and Baba who had taken Rami and me so far from Abu Shusha. Even if we had to leave our village, we could have stayed closer to home, stayed in Saadnayel or gone to Cairo where it would have been easier to start over; many of my cousins in Saadnayel told me that. But no, Yama and Baba decided to have us take this impossibly long journey to live among people who seemed no different from the soldiers and settlers back home.
I considered running away before the next ship arrived, but the thought of sleeping by myself or wandering the streets at night was more unfathomable than willingly boarding another ship.
I did better on that one anyway. I kept my food down and felt strong enough to stand and walk around a bit, though we didn’t have much space to move around. I could tell that even Yama was uncomfortable being close to so many people for so long; she bunched her shoulders up, making herself smaller to create more open space. She often counted her prayer beads and recited suras, her eyes half closed. If she was feeling more energetic, she would quiz Rami or me on which sura she was reciting, sometimes asking us to pick up where she left off. If we got it right, she would join in, and then the three of us would be reciting in unison. She would also go through a list of all the English words she could think of: orange, tree, soldier, world, house, settler, farm, like she was making sure that she still had them stored in her head.
Rami and I also found a way to pass the time together: making up false translations of the foreign languages we overheard. There was a blond man whose thick beard and overbite reminded me of a lion, and whenever he spoke I dubbed his voice with a slight roar while puffing my chest out, like he was shouting to someone far away from him, though he usually only spoke what seemed like a few sentences to another man who could have been his brother in a low and level tone. Rami often tried to outdo my impression when he dubbed the voice of the lion man’s brother, but I scoffed and told him that a thin, clean-shaven man like the lion man’s brother would never have such a strong and deep voice. Besides, Rami was much better at doing impressions of the girls my age, mimicking the speed of their speech and the rapidly changing tones as he imagined them fussing over the smallest annoyance.
Occasionally, Yama chuckled at our translations, but sometimes she would snap and tell us to be respectful. I could usually tell what mood she was in by which sura she was reciting: if it was a condemnatory one like Al-An’aam, about people who worshipped false gods and who valued hedonism above all else, then she was more likely to stop our antics, but if she was reciting a lighter one like An Nahl, about the wonder of God’s creations, then she would laugh or ignore us.
Most of the time, though, I spent in my bunk. I usually wasn’t feeling too sick after that first week, but with my eyes closed and my nose covered it was easier to imagine sunlight and feel its warmth on my body. Sometimes the sweet taste of grapes or the thick smooth flavor of warm goat’s milk would come to me, but I tried to block any food or drink from my mind because my stomach would growl, and the hunger pangs intensified.
I thought of Baba often, wondering if I would recognize him when we met again. When he first left, Rami and I would sit by the fire and talk about how much we missed him: the funny faces he would make when he was playing with Muhammad; the way he would imitate the voices of settlers and soldiers; or just feeling his warmth when he hugged one of us. Sometimes Yasmeen or Yama would join in, give an anecdote about the time Baba did something funny or kind, but once in a while Yama would say that Baba was like a hero in a story, one who had to go far away to do right by his family or village. This was mostly for Rami’s benefit, who was obsessed with the story of Saladin, a hero who originated from Abu Shusha and left his family to save the Holy Land from Western invaders; Rami even tried to teach Muhammad to battle with an imaginary scimitar, but Muhammad was not coordinated enough to make the slashing moves, so he just flailed his arms. If Yasmeen was being more combative, she would sniff disbelievingly, but Yama ignored her.
But eventually we spoke of him less and less, and fewer and fewer of my thoughts would turn to him throughout the day. Now it was like those first days again where the thought of him would pop into my mind so much, except that I didn’t speak to Rami or Yama about it because I didn’t want to tell them that I didn’t know if I wanted to see Baba now. It wasn’t because Yama had repeatedly threatened over the years to let him know of all the infractions I had committed, especially when I would storm out of the French boardinghouse; I knew she wouldn’t. It was that I wondered how things would change with him now that he spent so long in America, and if we would still feel like family to him.
And I was so different with little pockets of fat on my chest, that I knew that somehow Baba would not be my father in the same way he had before, that it would be a more distant connection between us like the one between him and Yasmeen. A relationship where it was somehow all right for so much space to separate us forever.
Those worries took over my body when the ship docked, and I doubled over to retch my breakfast on the floor, only faintly registering the disgusted groans from those who eagerly pushed past me to begin their new lives.
Lena Mahmoud is the author of AMREEKIYA and a finalist for the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Her short writings have appeared or will appear in Fifth Wednesday, Sukoon, and East Jasmine Review, among others. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.