Jellyfish in Gaza

We made a deal that every time we had a bad thought about Dad, we went into the water hole. It was a rule that my brother and I created to keep our father safe, while he was in Gaza. If we kept doing the rituals, he would stay alive. The water hole was a well, covered in rusted sheet metal. Dad used to take us there. He was the monster inside the well, a creature that lived in the dark, waiting for curious children to fall in. He lay submerged in the water, waiting. We took turns sticking our heads in and shouting, and then he jumped out and chased us, dripping wet.

Eyal told me he had pictured Dad in his uniform, buttoned up to the collar. It was a bad omen. Only dead soldiers were buttoned up to the collar. In order to counter-balance the bad thought, he needed to spend one minute in the water hole. The well was deep and narrow, the space just wide enough to fit a grown man. My brother grasped the rim with his thin wrists, hanging like a fish off a hook. He lowered himself slowly into the cold water, arching his back, howling and shivering, blue-lipped. Once he was inside, I pushed the sheet metal shut on him with a clang. He told me to let him out, that this was a dumb idea. Please, he said. I said never and sat on the metal, keeping it down with my weight. I felt his hands clawing from the other side, trying to escape.

My bad thought was on-going. It never really stopped, but I didn’t tell Eyal that, otherwise he would have kept me in the well forever. I saw Dad shot, strangled, stabbed, crushed. Once, he even choked on the canned food the army gave out as provisions. When it was my turn to go in to the water-hole, I couldn’t stop thinking of Dad drowning. I closed my eyes. I heard the metal sheet slide shut above me and I panicked. I pounded the walls, kicked my feet until they slipped on a jagged edge and bled. I was going under, water rushed up my nose, stung my eyes. My fingers grasped for a handhold, clutching at the grooves in the stone. Every time I tried to shout, water filled my mouth. Light came in, and I caught my brother’s hand and he pulled me up out of the hole. I spat and heaved, puking water until I felt empty.

At home, we made tallies of our cuts and bruises. A bluish yellow bruise below the right knee. A small cut in the shape of a half-moon above the left eyebrow. Cracked, dry knuckles. Split lip. A hairline fracture of the shin. Two scratches on the left shoulder-blade. It didn’t matter whose injuries they were. They could have been mine or my brother’s. We were fraternal twins. We looked almost the same, except he had a mole on his chin, my eyes were further apart, his hair was slightly darker, and one of my front teeth was chipped from a fall. We closed our eyes and imagined each other’s pain. It was part of our ritual, to lessen Dad’s pain.

We lived in Zikim, a kibbutz in the Negev, close to the border with Gaza. Our village grew mangoes and avocadoes. Yellow wildflowers grew on the hills. We used to pick the flowers with Dad, rub them all over our bodies, run around and flap our hands, pretending we were Yellowhammer birds. Along the sand, houses reared up, bleached and splintered as fragments of bones. We collected shrapnel from fallen Quassam and Katyusha rockets. Dad drilled holes in the metal pieces and looped lengths of string through them to make necklaces for us.

We shared the same beach with Gaza. Before he left, Dad told us that if we wanted to talk to him, we could just ask the jellyfish to pass on a message. We used our sticks to interrogate them, demanding answers and poking them in their soft bellies. Tell us where our dad is! We didn’t know where it hurt the most if you were a jellyfish, since they were soft all over. Maybe they couldn’t feel anything. Sometimes, the jellyfish were our enemy, other times they were our friend. We jerked them around on sticks, like puppeteers. We made them march across the sand, glide in the air, swim in the sea. We took no prisoners. We whispered secrets and leaned in to hear their answer, knowing they couldn’t talk, but hoping they would anyway.

We did most of our rituals in the yard, where Dad used to take us camping. After he left, we refused to sleep in our beds. We set up a tent in the yard. We cast shadow shapes with our hands and a flashlight. We made rabbits run so fast they were a blur, birds fly away into the night, snails crawl across slow and steady, a swan raise its long neck. We opened cans of tuna, like we were really camping out in the desert. We stuck a piece of toilet paper in the tin, lit it on fire, watched as it burned until all the oil was gone. We slept close together, as if we were one person.

We wore our shrapnel necklaces and ate salted crackers until our mouths dried and cracked. We were parched, but to drink water was to admit defeat. We tore up grass and stuffed military camouflage shirts, hung them up on tree branches. They billowed in the wind, assumed the form of hunters. We propped up a pair of leather military boots by the trunk. We made copies of Dad, wooden soldiers standing in a row. We smashed pomegranates against the tree, watched them shatter like grenades. We dipped our fingers into the juice and pips, painted the soldier’s shirt red. Our fingers were sweet, sticky. We licked them clean. Still, he did not return.

The night before he left, we sat on the bed, all three of us. Our room was small, with space for a desk on which rested our most recent birthday present, an ant farm. It was a transparent box made of glass, filled with soil and sawdust, through which we could see tunnels and cavities, the pathways of the ants.

“Why do you have to leave?” Eyal asked him.

“See that?” Dad pointed to the ant farm, “that’s why.”

He explained to us how the Hammas had built tunnels all the way from Gaza into Israel. Some underground passageways led right into people’s living rooms. “We could be in the kitchen one day,” Dad said, “making eggs for breakfast and suddenly –” he clapped his hands – “gone!”

That night, I dreamt of thousands of ants scurrying into our kitchen from a hidden tunnel. They kept coming and coming, a huge swarm carrying off everything we owned, including pieces of us. Dad’s ear floated by, and Mom’s nose. A pair of worker-ants carried around my eyeball, struggling under its weight. They stole all of our bodies and grew and grew, until they were regular sized, walking among us, looking just like anybody.

The heat turned the grass yellow and the broken pomegranates rotted in the yard. We decided to bury the remains of the fruit. We dug holes in the earth. At first, we made many small holes, as if a giant woodpecker had come and pecked everywhere, without any kind of design. Then, we connected them to make one big dirt hole, one grave. We threw the pomegranate shells in, one by one, like stars being sucked up by a black hole. Eyal dared me to go into the hole, to lay there with the rotting fruit. I crawled inside. A small rectangle of blue hovered above my head, the earth surrounded me, dark and moist. It smelled sickly sweet, overripe.

“As long as you’re down there,” Eyal said, “Dad won’t be buried alive.”

We returned home from camping in the yard, silent and hungry. We found Mom sitting in front of the television. The news was on. We saw soldiers and looked for Dad on the screen, but we couldn’t find him.

“Are you sure he’s there?” Eyal asked. “I can’t see him.”

Gaza was greener than I expected it to be. There were fields of olive trees. I even saw cows and ducks. Rows of concrete houses with several stories, laundry hanging from the line. I watched as planes dropped hundreds of thousands of notes, little white paper birds fluttering down from the sky. For a moment, it looked like a snow globe.

“They’re warnings,” Mom said, “to leave, to evacuate homes. After the notes, come the explosions.”

After the explosions, the buildings were gone. The ones which were still standing looked skeletal, with huge holes. Tanks parked in fields and back yards. Only rubble, smoke and ash remained.

We cut up blank pieces of paper confetti and rained them down on each other. We burned an offering in the yard, a bundle of wildflowers and dry thorns, red and white bougainvillea, hibiscus petals, onion grass. In the bundle, we put our warning notes. We wrote on yellow Sticky Notes, things that Dad should watch out for: bullets, katyusha rockets, falling buildings, exploding buildings, knives, men in large coats hiding suicide vests, land-mines, jellyfish, tunnels. We lit the warning, and watched the smoke curl up and escape, drifting, we hoped, in his direction. When the ashes grew cold, we rubbed them on our faces like war paint, drawing lines along our eyebrows and cheeks, above our lips.

We hid in Dad’s closet, touching our noses to his coats and pants, to his boots and sandals, his string of ties hanging like tongues. He was everywhere in the closet with us. When we closed the door and it was dark, we felt him in the rustle of fabric. We found his dark shoe polish and painted our nails, then put our fingers to our nostrils and smelled Dad. We used to play hide and seek at home. Both of us would always go into the closet, every time, and he would pretend to look for us. When he found us, he would sit down among the coats, in the dark, and tell us a story. There was one story, about when we were born, that he told again and again.

“When you were both babies in the womb together,” he said, “you knew everything. You had all the knowledge in the world. You sat in Mom’s belly and studied Torah day and night.”

“Wasn’t it too dark?” Eyal asked.

“How did the Torah fit in her belly?” I asked.

“You had a flashlight,” Dad said. “And she had a big belly. Anyway, you came into this world knowing everything. But before you could speak, an angel came down and touched you here.” He put his finger above Eyal’s lips, then above mine, right on the indentation which bridged the mouth and nose. “And you forgot it all.”

~

When Dad returned from Gaza, he looked the same but acted different. He had the same eyes, which dropped down like a dog’s, puffy underneath. He had the same nose, sharp as a cliff-face, which arched down toward his lips. When he came out of the shower bare chested, with a towel wrapped around his waist, we saw the same birthmark above his bellybutton, shaped like an eye. He had the same half-finger on his right hand, from the accident in the kibbutz. He even had the same breath in the morning when he shook us awake, like burnt rubber.

On the surface, everything was the same. Except, he was different. We wondered if an angel had come to him to make him forget. We tried to test his memory, to ask him things only he would know. Eyal said that it was possible that Dad had died and been reborn. If he was reborn knowing everything, then the angel probably came to wipe his memory. When he drove us to Ashkelon National Park, we started asking him all kinds of questions, to test him. We asked him if he remembered what he did for our fifth birthday party. He didn’t answer. The answer was that he drew enormous tigers and elephants, snakes and zebras on the walls of our house. The plan was to break down the walls a month later to renovate, so he convinced Mom to let him transform our home into a painted jungle. We asked him if he remembered how many ants came in the transparent box he had gotten us. We got a note with the purchase telling us the number. He said he didn’t know. We also couldn’t remember, but it was a bad sign that he had forgotten as well. We asked him if there were really jellyfish in Gaza. He started sweating and thumping the wheel, over and over, his face red. He stopped by the side of the road, breathing hard, his hands trembling on the wheel. He turned back without saying a word.

That night, we watched him sleep, because we knew that people said all kinds of true things when they were dreaming that they wouldn’t say when they were awake. We sat and waited on the floor of our parents’ bedroom. All we could hear was the hum of the ceiling fan as it spun and then the alarm of a car out on the street. Then Dad started screaming and shaking in bed, the covers pulled all the way to his nose, and Mom was getting up now, too, and holding him. He was too strong for her, but she kept putting her arms around him, wiping away his tears. Were they in on it together? We had never seen him cry this way before, even when the refrigerator fell on his big toe and it swelled up to an enormous size.

“What if it’s not him?” I asked. “Someone else could have come in from the tunnel. He could be wearing a disguise.”

I Imagined Dad peeling off his face, exposing a man with completely different features. The face of the man inside Dad was thinner, with a three-day stubble, and a receding hairline. He stepped out of Dad’s body, dusted himself off. He rubbed his wrists from where the skin-suit disguise was pressed tight, and performed a series of stretches, cracking his back and neck. Below his collarbone, he had a tattoo of a large Babushka Doll, inside of which was another doll, and another, and another, getting smaller and smaller until they were just a dot of ink or a freckle.

We crawled onto Dad’s lap, pulled his nostrils wide and stretched the skin on his cheeks, to check if he was wearing a mask. We pinched his thighs and tickled his feet, to see if he still felt anything. He sat on the sofa, oblivious to our efforts, watching TV. We looked for rips and tears in the disguise, or obvious flaws in the design, like three ears. When we started pulling out the hairs on his feet, to check if they were real, he told us to leave him alone.

“We have to find the tunnel,” Eyal said.

We searched the house for any hidden entryways, passages and trapdoors. We opened cupboards and drawers, checked under the sink and every bed. We ran our hands on the floorboards, making sure there were no surprises. We even tried to peer down the toilet, since that was a possible entry route. It was hard to see clearly, so we tried to poke a stick in to see if the sewage pipe got wider, but the water ended up overflowing, spilling over the rim of the bowl and splashing our feet. We carried the ant farm outside, picked up pieces of loose gravel and smashed the glass, watching the insects escape in all directions. We destroyed it just in case the tunnels Dad was talking about were actually in the ant farm. It was useless, we would never find the tunnel.

“He’s probably covered his tracks,” Eyal said.

When we were younger, Dad taught us about S.O.S. signals. If we ever needed him, he said, we should make a signal. The best signal attracts attention, he explained. Use whatever you can find. The point is, make it big, make it loud, make it bright and strange. You need aliens and birds to be able to see it from above. He showed us pictures of crop circles and Mayan temples, aerial and satellite photographs of bodies of water, coral reefs the size of small cities. It made me sad to see the earth from above, the rows of checkered fields, the landmasses and oceans, the blinking lights of the cities and cars, all the tiny people. We needed to devise our own signal. If he was so far away, this was the only way to bring him back to us. If he saw the signal, wherever he was, he would come back to us.

On the beach we shared with Gaza, hundreds of jellyfish washed up on shore, looking like abandoned plastic bags. We tiptoed between their translucent bodies on the sand, as if we were playing hopscotch. We started collecting them. We knew that we were making something that will bring our old Dad back. He was going to be reborn, except this time with all of his memories.

“I’ll stab any angel that tries to make him forget,” Eyal said.

We carried the jellyfish off on the tips of our sticks, ripping their soft, translucent flesh, and staked them in our yard, like scarecrows. We made rows of staked jellyfish, one after another, all along the ground. We tied a string of fairy lights around them, making them glow. The yard was filled with their mushroom-like caps, florescent bulbs trailing tentacles like strings of pearl. We sat in the yard, among the bright jellyfish, and waited for our S.O.S. signal to work.