Meet Me in Gaza (30 page)

‘Very sorry for delay.’

The woman with her three kids has just crossed. I follow them down a dim corridor, towards Gaza. Half-way down the corridor is another Egyptian passport control that seems to serve no purpose whatsoever. The officer flicks through my passport without looking, because he’s too busy staring at my breasts. Silently, I hold out my hand for my passport. He licks his lips.

‘You fuck,’ I hiss under my breath.

At the end of the corridor, I peer through tinted glass on my left. In a hall on the other side of the crossing, hundreds of people are surging towards a glass screen, waving their documents like a flutter of small flags. These must be Gazans who are trying to leave.

Outside the departure hall, a bus is waiting to escort us to the Gazan side of the crossing operated by Hamas. We pay to board it. As he wrestles a bulging suitcase towards the bus, an elderly Gazan tells me that he and his wife have been waiting here since dawn. They are as round-shouldered as each other.

‘We were detained at Cairo airport, herded onto a bus and driven straight down to this crossing, just like animals,’ he says. ‘Then we sit here waiting more than six hours. Do we not deserve more dignity than this, entering our own country?’

Gazans have their own special detention cell at Cairo airport. They are usually ‘deported’ from the airport by being bundled onto a bus and driven straight to the Rafah Gate. This is the price extracted from them for the privilege of being allowed outside the Strip.

The bus trundles over the border into Gaza, past a posse of Egyptian soldiers lounging on top of a battered tank slouched beneath the shade of a tree. At the Gaza terminal, there are more bum-numbing moulded plastic chairs. But the Hamas officers are far more efficient: most of the Gazans clear passport control within moments. I cannot see any other foreigners here, so I’m not surprised to be the last one sitting. A small man in plain clothes walks over and sits beside me. He says he needs to ask me some questions. He asks why I’m here. I used to live here, I tell him, and have returned to write some freelance articles for a Scottish newspaper.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asks.

‘With friends.’

‘But where?’

‘In the city centre.’

I am renting an apartment from my old landlord Abu Ali again, but don’t want to mention his name in case Hamas spooks appear at his gate.

This tactic always worked with Israeli officers. But the Hamas officer waves over another man, a bulky specimen with a spiky moustache and a bovine stare. Bulky says to the small guy: ‘We need information from her.’ Then he stands over me to make sure I realise he means business.

Another Hamas officer searches my bags and ignores my two bottles of whisky. More officers with thick beards and hard eyes join in, arguing among themselves about what to do with me. Nervous and claustrophobic, I start raising my voice. ‘Why can’t you just let me into Gaza?’ They stare me down – and it dawns on me that they can send me straight back to Egypt. I don’t like these men, but the information they want is basic. I am just making things hard for myself. Now I want to back down. But there is no point negotiating with Bulky. I look towards the small man who first questioned me.

‘Please, can we find a way to resolve this?’ I ask him quietly.

He confers with his colleagues. Two Hamas security officers will drive me to my apartment and speak to my landlord. For my own security.

It’s late afternoon when we finally leave the Rafah crossing compound, accelerating north towards Gaza City. Gaza looks the same. The same pitted roads, battered cars, flat green fields and rows of palm trees. The same raw grey concrete houses, the knackered knock-kneed donkeys … the same, but different. I can feel it already. As I speed towards Gaza City with my two minders, I feel disembodied, as though I’m not really here myself, but watching footage of somebody else arriving. When the Hamas jeep pulls up outside Abu Ali’s building, a plain-clothes Hamas officer is already waiting for me at the gate. He repeats the security mantra and I acknowledge his words with a small nod, without asking how he got here before me. Abu Ali opens the gate, looks from me to the officer standing beside me – and his expression instantly rearranges itself into a compliant smile. I stand back as he and the officer confer, and then shake hands, without breaking their smiles. A few minutes later, as the Hamas officer and the minders are leaving, Abu Ali looks at me, one eyebrow raised in question.

‘I am so sorry,’ I say, mortified at the trouble I’ve brought to his gate.

‘Don’t worry, this is Gaza. Welcome back!’

The first person I call is Saida. ‘
Habibti
!’ Her voice sings down the phone. She demands that I come straight over to her house.

‘Leave everything. Just get a taxi here, so that we can see you.’

‘Just give me half an hour,
habibti
,’ I say.

I slump on the couch, smoke one cigarette, then another. These last few months, I have been near-obsessed with getting back inside Gaza. Now that I am actually here, I’m tired and unsteady, unsure of how I feel. The first time I came to Gaza, almost three years ago, I remember standing on the al-Deira Hotel terrace, smelling the petrol-blue Mediterranean and wrapped in the same un-feelings. I go to the bathroom to wash my face – the tap water is still tepid, salty – then call a Lebanon Taxi. I’m in that exhausted but restless state of jet lag, my nerves jangling.

When the driver arrives, I don’t recognise him. He heads east across the city, towards al-Tuffah where Saida lives, as I stare out of the streaked windows. The traffic is heavy with shiny four-wheel drives and dozens of dinky little tuk-tuks, roaring up and down the streets and farting blue fumes. I wonder whether they come from the tunnels, or Israel, or both. The taxi driver has a tired, sullen look about him and ignores me when I tell him I used to live here. I ask how things are now. His shrug is a tired, sullen gesture.

‘Nothing changes. Too many taxis … nowhere to go.’

When I open the gate into the courtyard in front of Saida’s house, the old potter is still squatting in his workshop, glazing vases and bowls. He looks up and casts me a smile.

‘
Marhaba
, we haven’t seen you for a long time.’

The familiarity is welcoming; but the green Hamas flags hanging from the gate are not. Saida’s family are not Hamas.

I clamber back up the familiar raw concrete steps, appreciating the breeze from the window frames that still have no glass. Saida must have heard me – she is standing at the top of the stairs.

‘You came back,
habibti
! Really, I did not think you would.’

Her arms are already around me.

‘I told you I was coming back!’

‘Yes – but I didn’t think they would let you in!’

We embrace, laughing, and when she lets me go, Saida keeps smiling. But she looks thinner and tired.

‘My work is too demanding,’ she complains, almost cheerfully. ‘But what else do we have here? You know Gaza …’

Her sister, Maha, is in the living room, hunched over a desk, studying. She kisses me and pinches my arse. She turned 18 while I was away, has ripened into a real beauty and is going to study engineering at university in Gaza. I pinch her arse back and she squeals. As the three of us are bantering, I hear their mother, Hind, hollering for me from her bedroom. I find her sprawled on her double bed and give her a full body hug.

‘
Ahlan wa sahlan
!’ she exclaims. ‘I cooked dinner for you, Leeza!’

When we emerge from the bedroom, her husband, Nadim, stands poised in the kitchen doorway with his son, Muhammad. Nadim acknowledges me with a nod and a twinkling smile; I can tell he’s glad to see me. But Muhammad looks a bit cowed, as though he has shrunk inside himself. I ask Nadim if he is still playing football.

‘Every weekend,’ he says, ‘thanks to God.’

Compared to the rest of the family, he looks fit and fresh. He excuses himself to go and pray.

Hind pushes me into the kitchen, where we crowd around the table for supper. As she stuffs herself, she laments the fact that she’s still fat. Saida rolls her eyes. It almost feels like I have never been away.

Hind wants to know if I have seen her daughter, Alla’. I explain that I haven’t been back to the West Bank since I left Gaza eighteen months ago – and because I’ve just come through the Rafah crossing, there is no way I can now travel to the West Bank via Israel. As I entered Gaza via the Rafah crossing, I would have to exit via Rafah too: I cannot enter or leave Israel via the Erez crossing in northern Gaza. Hind tells me that Alla’ has applied for a permit to come back to Gaza for a few days with her two children.

‘Maybe they will be allowed to come soon – while you are here, Leeza. I have not seen them for seven years now.’

Tears are shining in her eyes.

Later that evening, inside Saida’s bedroom, as we are drinking coffee and eating soft dates, Saida says to me, ‘
Ummi
thinks that my sister, Alla’, will be coming to visit us very soon.
Ummi
, she doesn’t really understand about the permits – but if my sister and her kids cannot come, she will be so upset.’

‘Do you think the Israelis will give her a permit?’ I hear the doubt in my own voice.

Saida throws her shoulders up slowly, then lets them drop – ah, the Gaza shrug!

I remember Hind weeping after telephone calls to her children and grandchildren over in the West Bank; I remember Saida and Maha singing Arabic songs to their brother in Chicago on Skype – all of them determined to stay in touch, despite not knowing if they will ever sit in the same room together again. Even now that Rafah is ‘open’, many Gazans in diaspora won’t risk coming back for fear of being imprisoned here once again.

‘And what about you – how are things?’ I ask Saida.

She presses her lips together for a moment, then says, ‘I tell you the truth, things are harder, you know. Because nothing ever changes, not in a good way. I work hard at my job at the human rights centre – to have some purpose here – and so I guess in some ways I
am
lucky; but the problem is that we don’t have much fun now. You know, when Hamas stopped us women from smoking shisha, then my friends decided to stay at home, so they can relax in peace.’

Hamas recently announced that women are prohibited from smoking water pipes in public, on the pretext of the risk to their health. Unmarried couples are now forbidden from sitting together in some cafés and restaurants, and mixed couples walking on the street are being stopped by the police on suspicion of being unmarried.

‘So what do you do in the evenings now?’

‘Stay at home!’ she laughs, rather sadly. ‘Go to work and come home, visit my relatives, speak with my parents. I keep myself busy, but there’s nothing new,
habibti
…’

Her voice is the same: calm and contained. Stoic. But she doesn’t look happy. She wants a good man by her side, but says she despairs of finding him here.

We talk for a long time, about love and life and our families and our dreams. Saida asks how long I will stay this time. About six weeks, I say. Then I have work back in Scotland. Later, recalling the green Hamas flags outside, I ask her who put them up.

‘You remember my cousin Muhammad, the one who lost both his legs in the war? After a long time he managed to get out of Gaza: he went to a hospital in Malaysia and got new legs there. When he came back from Malaysia with his new legs, we had a big party for him. Many of his
shabab
friends came and they put up the flags – because they are all Hamas now.’

Saida asks me to stay the night. But though I’m more than tired, I want to go back to my own silent apartment, and my unpacked luggage, and sleep. I call a taxi.

‘It’s good to see you,
habibti
,’ she says, squeezing my hand.

I love her, and this family. I know I can always retreat here if being back in Gaza feels difficult, and that’s all I need right now.

It’s been a hell of a day – and somehow it is still only 9.30 in the evening. I ask the taxi driver to drop me half-way down Umar al-Mukhtar Street, in the city centre. The shops will be open, I can walk the ten minutes back to my apartment and get a breath of cool evening air before I collapse into bed.

The street is quieter than I expected. I’m used to the city centre buzzing at night. The street lamps are dead, but the shops lit up, casting light onto the uneven pavement. I buy coffee and milk from a small store. When I leave the store and wander down the street, some people give me stares that make me feel vaguely uneasy because they are not friendly at all. Am I not supposed to be here alone on the street, at this time of night? There are a few other women around, walking in couples, all of them wearing
hijabs
and
jilbabs.
I’ve never had this sense of almost hostile disapproval here in Gaza before – people meeting my eyes with a frown or a scowl, a few aggressive sneers.

I reach the turn-off for my street. Two Hamas police officers are sitting on chairs pushed against a wall.

‘Is she a foreigner?’ I hear one say to the other.

‘Must be. No
hijab
.’

I’m really not in the mood to talk to them, or anyone. But as I walk past, one of them calls out, ‘Hey – are you a foreigner?’

‘Yes.’ I wonder what’s coming next.

‘Where you from?’

‘Scotland.’

‘Where?’

‘Scotland. You know: north of London.’

‘Scota-Land …’ The officer who called to me shakes his head. His mate giggles and nudges him to carry on.

‘I went to Saudi once,’ he says.

I walk a few steps towards them, to see them more clearly. They are both young and bearded.

‘How was Saudi?’ I say.

‘Wonderful – so beautiful! What do you think about Gaza?’

‘I like Gaza a lot. I used to live here.’

‘You don’t live here now?’

‘No. I live in Scotland – I am just visiting for a few weeks.’

‘Ah … what about the Jews? What you think about them?’

‘I think the Israeli occupation is destroying Gaza. What do you think?’