Breaking Through The Border
The Anklet of Maioumas
A short story from The Sea Cloak, by Nayrouz Qarmout, translated by Perween Richards, (UK: Comma Press, 2019)
In a long, loose-fitting dress, a figure can be seen dancing between the gigantic columns of the temple. The dappled translucence of her dress blends with the marbled surface of each pillar. The dress trails behind her as she moves – a thin, diaphanous layer of fabric that traces the outline of her frame whenever it settles back around her. Both the swirl of the marble and the whorl of her dance seem to point, spiralling upwards, towards the capitals of each column, and beyond to the domed roof and the oculus at its centre. Leaves from an old olive tree can be seen matted into the girl’s hair, which fans out around her shoulders and all the way down to her lower back.
As the figure dances, a faint, tinkling sound can be heard: an anklet, decorated with coins that dangle over the girl’s left foot. Nearby, out in the square, or somewhere beyond, a grain mill can also be heard turning and turning its wheel, as if in time to music that only the girl can hear. It picks up speed as her dancing does, spinning between the columns. The coins ring louder, glinting in the temple’s shadows, throwing their golden lustre upwards onto her legs.
A third sound accompanies the tinkling of the anklet and the low hum of the basalt stone grinding the wheat: the sound of the sea. A woman with eastern features sits out in the square watching the figure in the temple whirling from column to column, as if this vision represented her destiny, not a past she’d long escaped.
The girl revolves around one column, her right hand pointing to the ceiling above her, her left reaching down, tracing the circumference of the column’s lowest stone. To the old woman outside, it seems for a moment as if the whole column is balanced in the palm of the girl’s hands, as she spins around it. Seeing the woman looking at her, she calls out: ‘Make the mill go faster! I want to see who can spin the fastest!’
The old woman, cloaked in a black dress with the emblem of a bird tattooed on her forehead, laughs. ‘It’s going as fast as it can. You’re too fast for it, Princess.’ The girl spins on.
Again the sound of the sea echoes through the square, as if it’s coming from the very sky above them. As the mill wheel turns, the anklet chimes deeper and deeper, like the bell above the Maioumas town forum, announcing some imminent danger. Or the bell of a boat caught in a storm, or some vessel already drowned.
At the foot of a mountain crawling with olive trees, a young man looks up across to the sprawling city of Jerusalem. Dressed in ragged, dusty clothes, he tries to make out the Dome of the Rock in the haze, while peeling an apple with a pocket knife. ‘Back to work. Let’s finish this thing!’ his friend shouts. ‘Break time is over.’ Forgetting his knife, the young man jumps off the rock he’s been sitting on, and sets about loading up the heavy stones needed for the foundation of a new settlement.
Back in the coastal city of Maioumas – a city which, thousands of years later, would be discovered by archaeologists wearing diving suits and oxygen masks – the girl’s dancing intensifies. In the square outside, a man arrives with a bag of tools, followed by a large block of stone, drawn by a horse and cart flanked by two labourers. As the stone is set in place, he lifts a hammer and chisel, and makes the first blow. ‘This will be the entrance to the fortress,’ he explains to the woman in black, looking on. ‘I carved those columns over there, you know,’ he adds, pointing to the temple.
The princess’s anklet stops tinkling. At the sound of the chisel’s tapping, she rushes to the temple’s entrance and stares at the sculptor working on the stone opposite her. The princess freezes, as if she too were one of the columns being shaped by his careful fingers. The mill wheel carries on turning. The old woman watches on with a surreptitious smile. In the silence, she feels her own sweat gathering on her skin. The sculptor is too focussed on his work to notice the noise he is making.
‘Slow it down!’ the princess yells to the old woman, meaning the mill. This breaks the sculptor’s concentration who turns to greet the princess. The princess approaches him, ‘Your handiwork is truly marvellous,’ she exclaims.
He smiles at this: ‘Not as marvellous as the sculptor that made you, Princess.’ The sun beams down on her, and the sea calls her name. She runs towards it, abandoning the sculptor.
The young man returns to his rock after a hard day’s lifting. He has the kind of muscular frame you’d expect of a builder, but his facial features are far more delicate than his co-workers’. Usually in the exhaustion that immediately follows a long day’s work, his thoughts start to wander to a fixed time and place in his memories: the image of a girl running on the beach; she was like an old Roman princess untouched by history, but given to the sea of Gaza like a precious offering. He can almost see the girl dancing before his eyes, and smell her feet on the ancient sands. He bends to pick up some soil then rubs it between his hands.
The horse’s neigh reaches her, and she has a sudden yearning for the smell of damp, fresh hay. The princess goes to feed her horse but, as she approaches, hears the faint sound of sighs and whispers coming from a nearby stable. Slowly she steps towards it, careful not to make a sound. She glimpses through a narrow crack in the wall, and there, lying among the hay, is her sculptor. His nimble fingers move, not on a marble column, but on the ivory legs of a woman, glinting in the rays of sunlight that steal in through the cracks. His fingers move slowly and slyly like a mill wheel turning and grinding on nothing. She listens to the woman’s groans and sighs, and the sculptor’s whispers. It is the stable master’s daughter. The horse neighs nearby as if sobbing over a broken heart.
A girl sits on an outcrop of ruined wall, half-submerged in the sands of Gaza’s beach. In a pool of tide water, trapped in one of its crevices, she has spent many hours inspecting her reflection, half pretending it was the face of an ancient princess, looking up at her through the ages. Between the rock pool and the waves out on the horizon, she has imagined the princess to be very much like her. Today, though, her eyes are itching and she finds it hard to focus: the image in the water keeps breaking up, as if the rocks themselves were shaking. The girl rouses herself suddenly, as if waking up from a nightmare.
For the first time, she feels the sun in her eyes, and notices the edges of the wall she has been sitting on are sharp and uncomfortable. She hadn’t felt any discomfort till now. She looks at the sky and thinks how beautiful and distant it is, and gets to her feet, feeling back to her normal self again – not cramped and shrunken and hemmed in, the way she does in the narrow confines of the city. Here she is free, full size. Free to wear trousers, not a dress. Free to run in the wind, with only the sound of the ancient mill ringing in her ears. Then a café up on the promenade distracts her, with its noisy TV spewing out the day’s news, and everything comes back to her: It was an ancient mill they discovered, out on the seabed. They reported it on Al Quds TV.
The young man returns to his perch on the slopes of Abu-Ghoneim Mountain, and gazes down, beyond a high wire-fence, at a group of Israeli men chatting to their girlfriends in the park below. This rock feels like a cage to him, and these men are like wild birds free to fly outside it, wherever they choose.
He remembers his girlfriend’s tearful words to him: ‘When am I going to break through that border? When will they give me a permit to come and see you?’ Other voices crowd his mind, like the sound of his father’s voice: ‘You don’t have to wait for her to come. You only spent a few days in Gaza; how can you say you’re committed to her? The situation has changed, son, they have stopped letting ordinary civilians pass through Erez. Our lives and our work are here: I build the wall and you build settlements. Wake up from your daydreams, boy!’ There were the other sounds crowding his thoughts as well, sounds he wished he didn’t hear: drums and whistles, the clamour of festivities surrounding his eventual wedding to his cousin.
The girl runs across the beach, crying. She has missed out on life, she realises. Too many years have been lost in isolation, disconnected from the world. Years wasted waiting for permission to be reunited with her lover.
She had waited for him and felt sure that, one day, despite everything, they would be together again. But when the princess had seen her beloved sculptor in the stables in Maioumas, lying with another woman, the girl who had created her knew that the waiting must come to an end. Why wasn’t it clear to her on the land, what had become obvious out there, in the depths of the sea?
The bars of this cage can be broken, the man decides, bending down once more to touch the soil in the shadow of his rock. Only this time, his fingers aren’t satisfied with just a handful of dirt, they scratch deeper and deeper, until they strike something hard and cold. A metal box. As he retrieves it from the soil and opens it, his throat tightens. The text imprinted along the barrel seems oddly familiar: 92 FS BERETTA. He passes it from one hand to the other for a moment, getting used to its weight. Then he takes aim. He chooses a young Israeli teenager skipping around his girlfriend in the park below, like two birds blissfully ignorant of the fact that they’re being hunted. A gunshot echoes across the valley. Then another.
The coins on the girl’s anklet begin to jangle loudly as she runs across the beach. The sound of the mill wheel’s relentless grinding grows louder. Grains are being scattered everywhere, she thinks. Then there is a great noise, like a crack of thunder, as the wheel comes off its axis and hits the lower floor, then another as it falls flat on its side. What a cacophony. Or is it the sound of gunfire, she thinks. The anklet continues to jangle and tinkle and ring above the wet sands of Gaza beach, but against the crashing of the waves in the distance, no one can hear it but her.
The Sea Cloak is published by Comma Press and is out now in paperback (https://commapress.co.uk/books/the-sea-cloak).
Nayrouz Qarmout is a journalist, author, and women’s rights campaigner. Born in Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Damascus, as a Palestinian refugee, she was ‘returned’ to the Gaza Strip at the age of 11, where she now lives and works in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Her debut collection The Sea Cloak has received numerous prizes.