Kapitel 9: June in the Kitchen Hole1967
Die Erzählerin ist Amal, die Tochter Hanans, sie hat den Krieg in einem Loch in ihrer Küche im Lager überlebt.
Das Loch war mit einem Platte zugedeckt und hatte ursprünglich dazu gedient. Die Waffen, die ihr Vater dort versteckt hatte, unauffindbar zu machen. Jetzt hat sie zusammen mit Huda und einem Baby, was ihnen anvertraut worden war, dort gelegen und hat in der Dunkelheit nur die Geräusche gehört, die von dem Angriff der Israelis für sie zu hören waren. Gesehen hat sie mal die Beine von israelischen Soldaten. Als sie etwas aus dem Loch heraus kamen, werden sie von einer jordanischen Nonne entdeckt, und innen wird behelfsmäßig geholfen. Sie werden nach Bethlehem in die Geburtskirche Isas gebracht, wo sie in ein Wasserfass hineinsteigen dürfen.
„The church where Master Esa was born had been shelled and still
smelled of fire. Inside, hundreds of children, most of them orphaned by the
war, sat on the floor. No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm
reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was
merely a nightmare. The silence reached up to the cathedral ceiling and
cluttered there, echoing sadness and unseen mayhem, as if too many souls
were rising at once. We were existing somewhere between life and death,
with neither accepting us fully.
Sister Marianne arrived, carrying an urn of water.
“Follow me, dears. You’ll need to bathe together to save water,” she
instructed us as Huda and I walked behind her to the washroom. The good
nun poured the water and left us. We were so bewildered that we got into
the metal tub with our filthy garments. The warm water traveled over my
body like a loving embrace, whispering a promise of safety.
Huda and I disrobed in the tub and sat across from one another.
Browned water separated us, but our legs rested together. Face to face, we
stared at one another’s thoughts, seeing each other’s terror and knowing that
we had crossed some unmarked boundary beyond which there could be no
return. The world we knew was gone. Somehow we knew that. We cried
silently and moved into each other’s small arms.
We lay that way, in the quiet of a foreboding for which we knew no
words. I looked at my toes protruding from the water. Chipped red polish. It
had been only one week since we had passed around the nail polish, giddy
over something that had made us feel older. Now, in that bathtub inside the
church where Master Esa was born, Huda’s nails and mine still bore the
chipped red remnants of that day. I calculated one week as the distance
between girlish vanity and hell.
Slowly, I let my body slide, pulling my head beneath the water. There, in
that silent world, like the stillness I had heard after the blast that had torn
the kitchen and killed Aisha, I had an odd desire to be a fish.
I could live inside water’s soothing world, where screams and gunfire
were not heard and death was not smelled.“
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