The Blue Between Sky and Water Read Online Free PDF

She needed to see Khaled, to let him know where she was going so he could find her again.
    The well was some distance from the center of the village where most of the fighting had been taking place. On a normal day, Mariam would have taken for granted that the whimpers and cries and claps in the distance were the calls of wild animals—dogs, goats, donkeys, birds—or the shots of hunters. But this was no ordinary day. The thunder of bombs and the way they jarred the earth was unmistakable, and she knew that the muffled sounds that followed reverberated from human agony. For nearly two days, Mariam did not move from the shelf in the water well, not even when strange men speaking in a strange language arrived to fetch water.

ELEVEN
    War changed people. It created cowardice and bravery and produced legends. It told the story of my great-teta, a strange woman, made of love, who never told a lie and who moved through the world differently than most. Her story was repeated many times, and in the retelling, she became known as Um Sulayman, the brave old woman of Beit Daras.

    The Naqba, the Catastrophe that inaugurated the erasure of Palestine, started slowly in 1947, one atrocity at a time throughout the country. For Beit Daras, the decisive battle occurred in May 1948, soon after European Jewish immigrants declared a new state called Israel in place of ancient Palestine. The Haganah and Stern Gang now called themselves the “Israel Defense Forces,” and they marched into Beit Daras after hours of sustained bombardment with mortars. A battalion from the Sudanese army came to help, but it arrived too late. The forest was engulfed in flames, swallowing homes to the north. Clouds of smoke hovered low, painting the world black, settling on the dead like dark shrouds and invading the lungs of the living, who heaved and convulsed as they sought refuge. Chaos reigned, perpetuated by more explosions, gratuitous now that Beit Daras was fully consumed by the fog of death and defeat. The villagers who had stayed behind either had been killed or were already fleeing toward Gaza, and the rest were taken prisoner, never to be seen again.
    Palestinians escaping from other villages converged on one of several main paths to Gaza that passed Beit Daras. Hajje Um Mamdouh, her son, Mamdouh, and Nazmiyeh’s husband, Atiyeh, survived the defeat and were now joining the stream of fleeing humanity. Sulayman helped them escape captivity. Um Mamdouh instructed the two young men to don women’s abaya s, then she pulled two red threads from her thobe and tied one around the crown of each boy’s head. “Everything below these strings will elude the awareness of soldiers. Sulayman will see to it. But you mustn’t remove the threads until you’ve reached safety, and then, you must not ever unravel the knot, no matter your circumstances,” Hajje Um Mamdouh instructed.
    When he stepped outside, dressed as a woman with a thin red thread cutting across his brow, Mamdouh could see and smell through his veil this new world of ash and the smolder of tired fires and expired lives. A rage rising from the black earth through his feet made it hard to move, and the incomprehensible loss of life and country seeped into his lungs, making him cough. He stood in a queue with three more families of women and children who had been rounded up by Zionist soldiers and were now dropping all their valuables into piles of food, jewelry, clothing, even photos. Mamdouh managed to leave with a single photograph, the only one the family ever had, taken by a journalist who had visited Beit Daras occasionally. It had been snapped on one of the days Nazmiyeh had tried to surprise Mariam by the river, to meet Khaled. Mamdouh was standing on the riverbank with his arm around Nazmiyeh, who stood sassily, hand on her hip. Their mother was there in a fine embroidered thobe she had sewn herself, but she was somehow still absent. And Mariam, perhaps eight years old, was captured in an