The Blue Between Sky and Water by Susan Abulhawa Read Free Book Online

communal toilets. Queues even invaded their dreams and shaped their rebellious thoughts, such that when some imagined fighting back, they thought of lining up first for weapons, then marching off as rows of fighters. And when the United Nations officials arrived, the refugees lined up to put their names in a registry, handwritten entries in thick notebooks. In return, they received small booklets to be stamped once for every ration received. As the reality of their predicament crystallized with every passing year, the refugees held on to every bit of proof of home to pass onto their children. These ration booklets would thus accumulate into pieces of identity and inheritance, sometimes framed in museum halls.
    When Nazmiyeh walked away from her rapists on that fateful day in 1948 without once being stopped, she understood that Mariam was still with her, that what she saw had not been a hallucination. Mariam’s persistent soul protected her. She was sure of it and she never doubted her sister could hear her. So she spoke to her often. At first it baffled Atiyeh to watch his wife speak to no one while she cleaned, while she bathed, washed their clothes. After each salat, she’d say, “Habibti, Mariam.” Before they made love, she would call out to Mariam not to watch. In time, Atiyeh grew accustomed to it and even considered that Mariam was perhaps watching over their family from the unseen realm. After all, Nazmiyeh reminded him, hadn’t he once been struck mute by the sight of Sulayman?
    “Do not doubt an existence merely because you cannot see or hear it, husband,” Nazmiyeh said to him. “I know I saw and heard Mariam that day, as I see and hear you now before me. She is the reason we survived our journey here when Zionists went on a killing spree after Sulayman set their soldiers aflame.”

    When her first child was born, a boy with gray eyes, Nazmiyeh saw only the eyes of her rapist and she cried out to the shadows, “This one is the son of the devil. Is Allah testing me? How can I love this thing? How do I love a son of the devil?” Astaghfirullah! The midwife put the baby to Nazmiyeh’s teats, but she pushed him away and continued to beseech what she could not see. “Mariam, tell me!”
    “You are delirious right now on account of the labor, but your crazy talk better stop before you let this baby starve, woman!” the midwife warned.
    Nazmiyeh turned her head and spied something in a dim corner of the room. She grinned, then laughed. It was knotted up and all-wrong laughter. The midwife, a woman from Beit Daras who could remember the hajje who had shat in the river and spoken to the djinn, surmised that Nazmiyeh was her mother’s daughter and was at that moment speaking to the forbidden realm. She looked to the corner of the room to see the object of Nazmiyeh’s gaze and saw nothing but random papers with childish drawings in an open wooden box. The midwife quickly collected her things, muttering Quranic verses, and left in such a hurry that she forgot to collect her fee from the husband waiting outside.
    Atiyeh swaddled his firstborn and stood over Nazmiyeh’s deserted eyes. The infant could not be assuaged and Atiyeh tried to coax his wife to feed her baby. He stroked her hair, put the baby in her unwelcoming limp arms, then took him back. He tried to calm the baby, but the crying hunger clawed at both father and son.
    “What shall we name our firstborn, Nazmiyeh? How about Mazen? Do you want to be Um Mazen, my love? Let him eat from his mother now.”
    “Name him Iblis!” she said. Devil.
    Atiyeh paced nervously, unable to console the baby boy whose cries echoed now from the abyss of abandonment. Finally, Atiyeh held their son in one arm and swung the other across his wife’s face, slapping her with the full force of his angst. “Nazmiyeh! You will feed this child now, woman, or by Allah, I will divorce you!”
    Nazmiyeh looked into her husband’s face and saw eyes of steel glistening with