The things we can never fully compensate for
He lived for eight days. Zayd and Hiba had a baby boy. They named him after Hiba’s father, Faris. Hiba’s father had died while unloading a cargo ship in Ashdod. Crushed by a container. Hiba never found out the full details. Her mother never got two month’s of pay that had been due to her husband.
Friends had told Zayd it was a bad idea to name his son after someone who had been so unlucky in life. Like tempting fate to have bad things happen. Zayd countered that his wife adored her father. He had been a very gifted poet, but needed a job, since poetry is not exactly a lucrative calling. He had been a hard worker. Hiba said she felt like a princess all through her childhood, because his father made her and her siblings like the most important, most cherished and most encouraged beings on the planet. That was enough for Zayd to agree to calling his firstborn Faris.
Hiba carried Faris in her belly for nine months. For nine months she needed 500 calories extra per day. In the west, where the main food challenge is how to avoid overeating, this would be all too easy. Not in Gaza. Zayd combined three jobs to provide for his pregnant wife. He was a cleaner at the local hospital, he sold all sorts of teas at the local market and he helped out at his father’s construction company. The company specialized in bathroom tiles and floors. He got about 5 hours of sleep. He usually slept in the afternoon. Even with three jobs they couldn’t afford anything fancy. It was a challenge to make sure Hiba got meat and fish at least twice a week.
Now Faris was dead. He had been born blue in the face. It had been immediately apparent his blood circulation was not optimal. His heart was struggling to pump his blood around. Because he was probably cold Hiba wrapped him in blankets all the time and never let go of him. Zayd doesn’t remember seeing his wife putting Faris down. They had to tear the boy out of her arms eventually. She screamed she wanted to be burried with him and that he would be cold in the ground and she didn’t want Faris to be cold and alone.
The boy could have lived, but that required an operation that could not be provided in Gaza. There was no possibility to travel abroad. Surgeons in Egypt could easily have saved the boy, but Zayd and Hiba didn’t manage to get out of Gaza. They sold whatever they could and gave all their money to some guy who claimed to have diplomatic connections, but he vanished and they never heard back from him. Their shekels worth 1,526 US dollars were never never seen again either.
What could Faris have become? What kind of man would he have been? Would he have inherited the gene for poetry from his grandfather? Would he have made it out of Gaza? Would he have set up a business in the UK or Austria or Germany or maybe the US or Jordan or Lebanon? They will never know now. They hardly got to know what his voice would have sounded like.
There was his smell, but that would fade. Hiba refused to wash his clothes or the blankets and kept them pressed to her face for hours and hours each day. Zayd pleaded with her to please stop doing this, because it would drive her mad. ‘They murdered our boy’, she kept repeating.
Five days after his death, five days without any sleep, she tried to cut her wrists, but Zayd was able to stop her. He reminded her that suicide would condemn her to hell for all eternity. Suicide is strongly rejected by Islam. She said she was already in hell on earth and wanted to go to the real hell, where she would wait for the murderers of her baby boy to arrive.
Because of his connections at the hospital as a cleaner Zayd managed to get tranquilizers. It didn’t stop her from crying, but she didn’t try to harm herself anymore. Hiba turned into a shaking plant, her face always wet with tears. She just sat on the ground all day with her back against the cot of Faris. He never once slept in it, because Hiba had kept him with her in her bed the whole time. She hardly ate or drank and lost a lot of weight.
Because Zayd had to take care of Hiba he hardly had time to mourn his firstborn. He developed a strange twitch in his right thumb. It was always jumping left to right and he couldn’t make it stop. He wondered if it was the first symptom of Parkinson’s. After years of cleaning at the hospital Zayd had picked up some rudimentary medical knowledge here and there.
Eventually he managed to talk to a friendly neurologist who told him he was a little young for Parkinson’s, that he was under extreme stress and took him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist wasn’t seeing any psychiatric patients anymore, but was doing the work of an ER surgeon, even though he did not technically have the qualifications for that kind of a job. With so many injured coming in from all the bombing they couldn’t be picky.
The psychiatrist said that Zayd and Hiba had to give some kind of meaning to the death of Faris. His death should become a call to action. An inspiration. If not there would never be any healing and the pain would destroy them. Lead had to be turned into gold. There would always be pain, but the pain could be turned into fuel if his death could be linked to some higher purpose.
At first Zayd was surprised a psychiatrist would come up with something so unscientific, so esoteric, so wishy washy.
Zayd frantically looked for what this higher purpose could be. At some point, in a moment of raging revenge dreams, he thought about developing a rocket and calling it Faris The Avenger. He scrapped that idea and didn’t want his son to inspire more death and destruction. He didn’t know a thing about rockets anyway.
The only thing that got him the attention of Hiba was when he mentioned the idea of having some kind of publishing house that would specialize in poetry collections. They would call it Faris Publishing.
The pain of losing Faris never went away, but at the same time it was the only thing that could keep a publishing house in Gaza up and running even though it never once made any profit.
When Zayd and Hiba joined Faris in heaven, one of their three sons, born years after Faris, took it upon himself to keep it going, even though he had to do it on top of his regular job as an electrician.
All three sons were also scarred by the loss of Faris, even though they had of course never met him. His death simply seeped into everything the family did. Hiba set an extra plate at every meal for Faris. The day she died she was holding Faris’s bodysuit. She claimed she could still smell him. Something nobody questioned out loud, but inwardly never believed. When she had been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of pancreatic cancer she had only said: ‘I will finally get to see Faris.’
Even though one son runs a publishing house his two brothers have never once voluntarily read a poem. They are both very serious businessmen. The only time they spend money that doesn’t somehow lead to them accumulating more money is when they generously donate to Palestinian charities or when they give their publisher brother money to keep the ever struggling Faris Publishing afloat.
They are neither unhappy nor happy, they are proud of what they have accomplished and all of them have family lives, but any love for poetry or any love for the softer things in life was killed in them when the heart of Faris stopped beating.
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