“At the rooftops of multiple homes, you can see the holes they dug out of the walls to make a place for the sniper. As you see here at my feet, hundreds of ammunition shells left behind. And of course, a few cans of Coca Cola because killing us is tiring work. Remember us the next time you open a nice, refreshing can of Coca Cola and please, enjoy!”
Jeneen ends the recording in disgust. The white glow of her own face looking back at her on the screen disappears and she is suddenly aware of just how dark it’s gotten. Her English is getting sloppy, the words slurring together. She wants to record all the details now, before she forgets, before whatever she encounters up ahead of them on the road supplants what she has just seen. But she is tired, and they’ve been sitting in this traffic jam for two hours and the car isn’t moving.
Her cousin Hany laughs from the driver’s seat. “Please, enjoy,” he parrots. “Nice.”
“That was terrible,” she says. “I won’t use it.” Ahead of them, she realizes that most of the cars have cut their engines. Some people have their doors open–she can see legs sprawled out onto the street. One man is even lying on the hood of his car, smoking a cigarette.
“Why aren’t we moving?”
Hany shrugs. Of all the people in her life who drive her around, carry her equipment, dodge gunfire, scale destroyed buildings, Hany is her favorite. His whole personality is basically that shrug. Nothing moves him one way or the other. They weren’t particularly close before the war, but now he is absolutely indispensable to her. When she needs a different lens, Hany has it ready before she even asks. When she crawls too deep into a bombed-out building, Hany is there to drag her out by her shirt collar. Before the war, Jeneen had been a student who made short art films her professors criticized as too sentimental. Now, she has millions of followers and everyone calls her a journalist. She was even nominated for a Hollywood award, but she didn’t find out until four days later because she didn’t have any WiFi. When she finds it difficult to keep track of what is real, Hany pulls her back.
Hany puts the car in park, cuts the ignition. He gets out and approaches the car ahead of them, a red Toyota with its bumper dangling from a few zip ties. She watches Hany chat with the driver of the Toyota, offer him a cigarette (which neither Jeneen nor Hany smoke, but carry with them as peace offerings, bribes, tokens of consolation). The driver takes the cigarette and starts gesturing wildly with it, chopping his arm through the air as if slicing invisible firewood. Hany smiles mildly at the driver, shakes his hand, and returns to Jeneen in the car.
“Well?” Jeneen asks when Hany is back in his seat.
“He says there’s a new checkpoint at Qal’at Bey. They’re searching all the cars.”
Jeneen looks down at the camera and tripod at her feet.
“Since when? There was no checkpoint there this morning.”
Hany shrugs. “Since sometime between this morning and right now I guess.”
“Shit,” she yells and punches the ceiling. Bits of peeling upholstery rain down on her and stick to her frizzy curls and gluey skin.
Hany raises his eyebrows in the rearview but says nothing.
Before long, traffic starts to move again, lurching forward suddenly, the cars wheezing and growling back to life, and Jeneen thinks that the checkpoint was just a rumor. Maybe traffic had been stalled because of an accident, a crater in the road, a fallen building. They make it a quarter mile before they have to stop again. Then they receive a message, relayed to them from the driver of the red Toyota, who hears it from the driver in front of him, and so on and so on, the world’s longest game of telephone–the checkpoint won’t be letting anyone else through tonight. They have to wait and try again in the morning.
Hany cuts the engine again and slumps over, his forehead resting on the steering wheel.
“Let’s switch for a little while,” Jeneen says. They have been out since six that morning, Hany shuttling her and her gear through nearly impassable roads, sometimes hopping out to clear debris in their path, and then, when they got as close as they could to Beit Yaroun, abandoning the car, and parking up off the road behind some bushes, obscuring it as much as possible. They pulled blue press vests over their heads and walked two kilometers to the ruins. Hany carried her tripod and her bag so that she could shoot as they walked.
“Stretch out in the backseat and sleep a while,” she says to him now.
Hany doesn’t hesitate. “Okay,” he yawns. “But wake me if traffic starts moving.”
Jeneen never learned to drive before the war–there was never any need. There was always a bus, a bike, her older brother or her father, an aunt, someone to take her where she needed to go. Plus, her whole world was only 40 kilometers long–it started at the southern desert, stretched for 40 kilometers up the coast, and then came to a sudden and complete stop, a concrete end she could neither see through nor over nor around. Why learn to drive when there was nowhere to go?
Hany had tried to teach her a few times. “What if something happens to me when we’re out?” he asked her blandly, as if the implications of the question were of no consequence to him at all. Through him, she had learned the basics. But she was terrible–when she got behind the wheel, she lost all the cool that she had out on the field. She got flustered and panicked, jerking the car into the wrong gear, forgetting to put it in park before turning off the ignition, slamming down on the wrong pedal.
“Some people think that the greatest danger we face is white phosphorus,” Hany once said to Jeneen’s older brother, Salim, after she had nearly run him over. “But it’s actually Jeneen behind the wheel.” It was the funniest thing he had ever said.
Jeneen promises him that she’ll wake him if the cars ahead start moving. “I know better than to try to drive myself,” she says. They switch places and Hany is asleep almost as soon as he’s stretched out across the backseat.
Jeneen lowers the driver’s seat back a little and rests her head on the window frame. In the dark, the ghostly outlines of cars stretch as far as she can see into the night. She thinks of the ‘67 war, the Egyptian planes lined up on the tarmac like sitting ducks, the whole fleet taken out in minutes. Above her, the shriek of drones she cannot see.
Her eyelids are heavy, the skin on her face tight around her bones. For the millionth time, she checks her phone– no connection. Her mother would be waiting for her, staring at Jeneen’s sleeping bag, empty next to the sleeping figures of her siblings. Her head lolls on her chest and the last thing she hears before she falls asleep is the whine of a mosquito behind her ear.
Jeneen wakes with a start, the gearshift jabbing into her right thigh, absolutely desperate to piss. She glances behind her–Hany is snoring lightly in the backseat. All around her, people are sleeping in contorted positions in their cars. She opens the driver’s side door as quietly as she can and steps out. In thirteen months of war, nine of those on the run, fleeing from camp to camp, Jeneen has never gotten used to the indignity of pissing outdoors. Hamza and Halima have really taken to it, saying they like the feeling of the wind on their bottoms, pretending to be tigers peeing freely in the jungle. “I sometimes seriously wonder if they remember toilets,” her mother once joked as they listened to the twins growl and purr from the latrine ditch.
She squints into the darkness, looking for a cluster of shrubs along the side of the road. She has to walk up about twenty cars before she finds a squat palm tree a few meters from the road. She can see a few people awake, shifting inside their cars, but there’s only one person outside on the road–a mother bouncing her baby, walking in circles around her car. Jeneen thinks this is the best she’s going to do, so she steps off the road and walks toward the palm tree. She drapes her pants over a palm frond and moves her underwear to the side with one hand. At last, she releases her urine into the dirt, careful to shift her feet so the stream doesn’t pool around her shoes. She is shaking herself dry when the moon appears rudely out of a black sky. It’s as if a hole has opened up in the sky, the moon rushing to pour down on her, filling the roadside with white light. She hurries to put her pants on, turning around so that her backside is to the road. That’s when she sees it, not three meters away, the chest caved in, the stomach deflated, what remains of the skin like a tattered cloth on barbed wire. Someone had thrown a shirt over the head, so it is just a torso, arms, and legs disintegrating beneath the pants.
When she gets back to the car, Hany is still asleep.
By dawn, everyone is awake, rubbing sore necks, pacing between cars, and bartering for breakfast. Hany trades two cigarettes for a cheese sandwich, which he rips down the middle with his fingers, handing Jeneen half.
She hadn’t been able to fall back asleep after her trip to the palm tree, so as the sky lightened, she noticed a cluster of milk thistle growing by the side of the road, miraculous really, the only green thing besides scraggly palms for miles.
Everything has been ripped up, choked with ash. But the thistle is a stubborn plant, hard to kill, hard even to touch. She walks over to the plant and begins filming with her phone, the battery on red now. She plucks a few leaves, careful not to prick her hands on the thorns, and tells the camera about how her mother likes to eat them at the beginning of winter, foraging for them, plucking the spiky edges off and then eating the tender middle right where she finds them. She says it boosts her immune system. Her mother can de-spike the leaves quickly, her fingers flying around the edges in a flash. But Jeneen is slow and clumsy, pricking herself several times in the process. She pops one leaf into her mouth for the camera– “Mmm, tastes very healthy,” she says. And then she stops the recording and brings ten leaves back to the car with her. She hands five of them to Hany, stacked neatly like delicate sheets of green paper.
“Look what I found,” she says, offering him his stack.
“Khalto would be proud,” he says, and chomps off the end of one leaf, grimacing a little as he chews.
“Now you won’t get sick,” Jeneen says. “Now, you’re protected.”
He nods and Jeneen goes back for more leaves, folding them in her pocket to give to her mother later. If this line of cars ever moves that is.
The sun blazes down on them and it is already too hot to wait in the cars, so most people are huddled on the road, sitting in the shade cast by their vehicles. Jeneen’s phone has finally died, so she takes her Nikon out of its case in the backseat and starts to shoot–children playing tic-tac-toe in the dust, a woman breastfeeding under her isdal, only the baby’s tiny bare feet visible under the cloth, a man opening his glove compartment and retrieving a worn paperback novel. She walks twenty cars up the road, shooting all the way. The children shout at her as she passes for her to take their pictures, sticking out their tongues or giving her their best mean mugs. Most people recognize her these days. They know who she is, but no one really treats her any differently. After all, she’s still here, waiting under the same sun. She stops when she gets to the squat palm. She doesn’t step off the road, but she does zoom the lens in. Now that it’s daylight, she can see the flies swarming around the body. She shoots.
They are hungry again, but all they can find in the car is a package of sunflower seeds. Jeneen rips it open and pours half the bag into Hany’s cupped hands. They sit on the road next to their car and crunch the seeds, spitting the shells out and competing to see who can spit them farthest. Hany is winning when a boy, about twelve years old, approaches them. They stop spitting.
“My mother told me to give this to you,” the boy says. He seems shy and doesn’t quite look at them as he speaks. Instead, he looks at their trail of shells. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a carrot. It is long and gnarled like a witch’s finger. The boy holds the carrot out to her.
“Where is your mother?” Jeneen asks, turning to look around for a woman the boy might belong to.
“She wants you to have it,” he says. “She says you’re a hero, but you aren’t taking care of yourself. She says you look pale in your recent videos.”
Jeneen laughs. “She says all that? Can I meet her?”
The boy shakes his head. “Just take it,” he says. “Please.” He stretches out his arm so the carrot is right in front of her face.
“I mean…” Hany whispers next to her. She shoots him a look.
“Only if you share it with me,” she says to the boy. “I insist.” She takes the carrot from him and swiftly snaps it into three pieces, handing one to the boy, one to Hany, and keeping one for herself.
“Let’s see who can make the loudest snap. Maybe it will wake those lazy soldiers up so we can finally get out of here.”
The boy laughs and nods.
“Ready? One, two, three, go!” All three of them bite down on their carrots and Jeneen pretends to recoil from the sound of their crunching. “Yours was definitely the loudest,” she says to the boy. He smiles shyly and then turns to leave, still crunching dramatically.
“Tell your mother I say thank you. And that if I look any better in the next video it’s because of her,” Jeneen calls after the boy. He waves a hand a little in acknowledgement but doesn’t turn back.
After that, she and Hany compete to see who can make their carrot last the longest, taking tiny nibbles until they are left with nothing but their own fingers in their mouths.
Traffic starts moving at noon, the cars inching forward in a slow crawl, the air around them reeking of exhaust and sweat, of excrement hastily buried by the side of the road, of piss evaporating in the heat.
Jeneen has hidden her camera equipment in a compartment in the trunk that is supposed to hold the spare tire. The press vests and helmets are too bulky to fit inside, so she does her best to cover them with her sweatshirt and stuff them under the seats. She knows that even the most rudimentary search will reveal the vests immediately. And what kind of journalists don’t have a camera? She thinks of everything she’s shot in the past twenty-four hours, none of it uploaded.
The checkpoint, when it finally comes into view, is nothing but a line of rubble piled across the road. To the right, the excavator that presumably moved the rubble. To the left, a tank. Above of all of that, a drone hovers like a great black mosquito. As cars are cleared, the drivers have to steer off the road, around the rubble, and directly under the tank to get around. The soldiers appear to be picking cars at random, waving some on and holding their weapons out to stop others. Some of the soldiers are meticulous in their searches, flipping up the sun visors, throwing floor mats out onto the street. Others are sloppy, pointing their guns around aimlessly inside the cars.
Jeneen has moved up to the passenger seat next to Hany. They sit in silence as they creep up the line, both clutching their ID cards in their laps. There are three rows of cars ahead of them. Two. One. Jeneen swallows a mouthful of saliva. Next to her, Hany is very still and very calm. The soldier in front of their car holds his palm out. Hany stops the car, puts it in park. Jeneen has watched this soldier open people’s suitcases and throw every single item into the dirt. She saw him open the lid to a metal thermos and pour the contents out onto the road. She knows he’ll find her equipment in seconds.
The Nikon was a gift from her father. On the day she got accepted into art school, she came home and found him sitting at the dining room table. He had a bouquet of orange and red poppies–her favorite–and a box he had clearly attempted to wrap himself, the paper bunched and covered in too much tape.
“Jeneen, my star,” he said when she pulled the Nikon from the box, cradling the focus ring with the tips of her fingers like a newborn baby’s soft skull.
“I’ll be behind the camera, not in front of it,” she said.
Her father tutted and shook his head. “Don’t you know the true magic makers are always the ones unseen?”
Missing her father felt like carrying around a newly-grown extremity, a limb she didn’t have before, a limb that was functionally useless, but that bled and bruised just like all the others as she lugged it around with her.
Now she is behind the camera and in front of it. She is editor, producer, director, star. She has audiences in Argentina, Albania, South Africa, Indonesia, Paris, New York. Her followers refer to her by just her first name, like she’s a pop star. Her fame is most certainly the only reason she isn’t dead yet, and why the people who sleep in the same tent or car as her are also not dead. And her fame will also likely be the thing that eventually gets them all killed. Wasn’t all fame fickle like that? Her father had been martyred early, back when no one outside of their 40-kilometer world knew her name, when Jeneen was still mourning their old lives, still weeping all day long, still trying to recreate what had already been lost. Then he was gone and she realized she needed a weapon. She picked up the Nikon he got her and wore it hanging from a strap around her neck, dangling heavy like her grief.
The soldier is standing at the driver’s side door with the tip of his gun an inch away from Hany’s temple. Slowly, Hany raises his hand from the steering wheel and shows the soldier their two green ID cards. Jeneen has a bit of nettle stuck in her molar–she shifts it with her tongue and her mouth is filled with a sharp bitterness.
The soldier is probably about Hany’s age. He has hazel eyes and thick straight eyebrows. He is gesturing them out of the car when an explosion erupts from somewhere behind them, the force of it rattling Jeneen’s teeth. She bites down on her tongue and tastes blood. She can hear their helmets and vests rustling beneath their seats. And even though she knows she should keep her eyes straight ahead, she turns to look back. The smoke rises from a point in the north west, probably no more than ten kilometers behind them, roughly where the village of Beit Yaroun used to be.
When the ground stops shaking, she can hear the soldiers shouting at each other. “What the fuck was that?” one of them shouts in their language. Jeneen wonders if the soldiers in front of her are the same ones who just withdrew from Beit Yaroun, if they had made it no farther than Jeneen herself before they were ordered to stop and erect this checkpoint. Was the young man with his gun to Hany’s temple the same one who drank cokes on a rooftop in the village? Of course, a sniper doesn’t man the checkpoints, but she can’t help but feel like she is chasing this man up and down the length of their world. From point A to point B, he is always ahead of her. He is shouting now, not at them, but to his comrades, and even though she speaks his language fluently, she cannot understand him. Her green ID trembles between Hany’s fingers, her sixteen-year-old self staring back at her, tight smile and smooth skin, a girl with a camera and a father and a home. She is twenty-one now, her skin ravaged by an infection that craters her cheeks.
Gunfire bursts into song like birds ascending from a tree. A rising, a clatter, a language all its own.
The soldiers panic, start ordering people out of their cars and face first onto the ground. The soldier with his gun to Hany’s head looks at them like he can’t understand why they are still there, holding him to that spot. “Get the fuck out of my way,” he screams. He turns from them, pointing wildly in the direction of the gunfire. Hany and Jeneen don’t know if he wants them to get out of the car, to stay where they are, or to keep driving. Behind them, hundreds of cars and a volley of gunfire that’s getting closer. In front of them, a wall of rubble. The only choice is to drive under the shadow of the tank, so close to the barrel that they could reach out the window and kiss it as they drove past.
Hany looks at Jeneen. Move or die. Move and die.
“Go,” she whispers. “Go, go, go.” She forces herself to keep her eyes open as they approach the tank. She wonders about the boy inside of that beast. If he has to move a lever or press a button or if it’s all done by computer, heat seekers, sensors that can find them without him having to do anything at all. She wonders about the boy who had given her the carrot, about his mother who worried about her health. Are they ahead of them or behind? Hany pulls the car back up onto the road. It will take them another seven hours and twenty-three kilometers before they arrive back in the place where they had started, to a tent city of mothers.
There is a word in Arabic that has no equivalent noun in English, although Jeneen does not know this. Jeneen speaks three languages and has seven million followers. But her world is 40 kilometers long. She does not know that her native tongue has a boundlessness that stretches beyond even the language imprinted on the planes and the bombs that fall from them. Her mind is always working to translate Arabic into English, even as she is watching young men collect limbs and bits of hair in bags, even as she is climbing over upturned desks in a burned-out school. She is always trying to reconstruct the image in the language of power. She has never considered what it would be like to move in reverse. She forgets that her native tongue is like a forest, that each word sprouts from a three-letter root, so many words shooting out from a single root in a dizzying spiral that stretches from seed to sky.
When they arrive at the camp and Hany cuts the engine, she can hear it–something that cannot be reproduced into English. Both a person and a sound, the two inextricable: Al-thakla. The wails roll out from a tent to their right. A bereaved mother mourns the loss of a child, her call with its own cadence, its own hum in the blood. The cry has music but no melody, meter but no words, the sound of it like a thump on the chest, a slap to the cheek, a peeling back of one’s own skin.
Hany jumps out of the car, rushing to the trunk to retrieve Jeneen’s equipment. She is slower–ever since the checkpoint her instincts have been dulled, her perceptions on a time lag.
Jeneen finally realizes she needs to get out of the car. She rushes to help Hany with the gear, slinging the bags over her shoulder and tucking the tripod under one arm.
“Go,” she says to him again.
Hany hurries toward the tent to the right from which the wail is emanating. Any one of their people walking by would point to that tent and say, “there is a thakla in there, may God have mercy on her.” Hany needs to prove himself undead, to reveal himself in his flesh and blood to his mother who made him from a seed.
Even with her muffled senses, Jeneen stops to wonder: is Hany the first child to hear his mother’s transformation into al-thakla? Is Hany’s mother the first to have been al-thakla and then to cease to be one? But no, of course not. In this world of theirs, they were constantly watching their own deaths, cycling between the dead and undead, past and future always colliding.
“Hany,” she cries out. Jeneen runs toward him, her gear slapping her limbs. She reaches for his hand and squeezes it. “Thank you.”
Hany shrugs, turns, and runs into his family’s tent. Jeneen doesn’t wait to hear the shrieks. She must turn left toward her own tent. She knows her own mother won’t be wailing. Her mother’s wailing is a clenched fist, something she holds tightly. Jeneen is terrified of the day when she will let it go.
Inside, her siblings’ bags are packed. Salim’s place is empty–he’s probably kicking a soccer ball around on the beach or smoking one of the cigarettes their mother pretends not to know about. Hamza and Halima are playing doctor. Hamza is lying on his back and Halima appears to be cutting into his abdomen with a plastic knife. Aziz, poor, lonely Aziz, is playing checkers against himself. Their mother sits on Jeneen’s sleeping bag, her body angled toward the tent’s opening, a plate of plastic-wrapped food next to her. She does not look at all surprised to see Jeneen duck into the tent, first her hair appearing, her head and shoulders following, and then her gear like black limbs. She doesn’t raise her eyebrows or cry out, she doesn’t stretch out her arms. The children are screaming with joy, pulling on Jeneen’s arms, batter-ramming their heads into her midsection. She kisses them and shakes them off with one motion. Her mother is still staring, her lips clenched shut. She doesn’t rise to embrace her daughter, but as Jeneen steps gingerly over the blankets and bags filling the floor of their tent, she opens her legs, which had been tucked underneath her, stretching them out into a V in front of her, so that by the time Jeneen reaches her, she has somewhere to fall. And Jeneen does fall–she collapses like the flame of a candle wick down into her mother.
Aisha Abdel Gawad is the author of Between Two Moons, winner of a New York City Book Award, a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and the Maya Angelou Book Award, and longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in places such as The Kenyon Review, Bon Appetit, Literary Hub, American Short Fiction, and The Muslim World. She is currently at work on her second novel.
