Maranda With An A

A few days ago we began clearing the rubble where our small clinic once stood in Jabalia. The bricks gave way like old bones, and the dust rose in a gray prayer no one answered. Today, returning on the long broken road that devours time like a beast devours bread, a young man beside me said, Are you Ezzideen Shehab? I nodded. He smiled with a tenderness that accused me. You do not remember me, he said. I did not. He gave his name, Ahmad R., and began to summon my own life before me, scene after scene, the kind of detail only a heart carries. I listened and pretended to remember, as a thief pretends innocence before the verdict. The truth is harder: I had forgotten not only his face but even his name, it was a stone in my mouth I could not taste. This small humiliation did not pass. It worked in me like a needle and revealed a deeper illness. People begin to speak and lose the sentence midway, as if a hand extinguished the candle of their thought. Another reaches for a simple word and finds only silence, and we gather around that absence as around a grave. Even the shopkeeper miscounts coins again and again. Something in us is dissolving. Our houses are falling, yes, but alongside them a quieter catastrophe proceeds, the dismantling of the inner rooms where a person keeps his days. Memory is the poor man’s palace. What is a man when the palace has no doors? This is not laziness. It is a collective malady of the soul. Too much terror has pressed on the brain like a stone on the chest of a sleeping man until he wakes strangled and believes he has consented to his own suffocation. The mind defends itself with forgetfulness. It throws names, faces, street corners overboard, the little proofs of existence. In Gaza we are all trading with the abyss, giving up a word for another hour of endurance, betraying a face for a little sleep, spending a memory to survive the next day. You will ask, where is guilt in such forgetting. Trauma forgets to live, conscience remembers to remain human, and between these two courts a person is torn. What am I to Ahmad R., who knew me, if I cannot return him to himself by recognizing him? Perhaps that is why the rubble shames me. Every stone knows its place, remembers the wall it upheld. But I, who bind wounds and write words, do not know where to place Ahmad R. in the architecture of my days. Is this not a kind of sin, to lose the one who remembered you? The wound of this place is not only in what it makes us recall but in what it forces us to abandon, piece by piece, until we stand like stripped trees. Trauma is not a Latin comfort but a teacher who says, choose, your sanity or your history. We choose to live, and in living we become lighter, and in becoming lighter we fear we have become less human. So we grieve not only for the dead but for the part of the living that has quietly departed. I do not know if God accepts this logic, but I know He sees it, the stammering in our speech, the trembling of the shopkeeper’s hands, the coins of our thoughts slipping through our fingers. Perhaps He remembers for us what we cannot bear. Perhaps somewhere every lost name is kept safe like bread that does not grow stale. And perhaps the work of a man in a ruined land is to keep sweeping, stone after stone, word after word, until recognition returns and the human face can be greeted by its true name. #WoundedGaza