‘I’d rather die than give it to you’, she tells one of the soldiers. ‘Soon’, he says. His buddies grin and drop their pants.
Asada has been displaced 14 times. Once for every year she’s lived on planet earth. She’s the last survivor of a family of 59. Her grandmother was the first to go. Airstrike. Dead along with two of Asada’s sisters, five cousins, three aunts and two uncles. Asada survived because she was visiting a friend at the time of the strike. Her younger brother was injured and her parents rushed him to the hospital. They were killed when an artillery shell exploded near the ambulance. Her brother got wounded a second time, this time fatally. One of Asada’s remaining aunts took her under wings. A week later they heard the family on her father’s side had also been bombed down south. Asada’s aunt said: ‘Your mother’s family and your father’s family must have been on their AI kill list. Lavender it’s called.’ In total they had five doctors, two of them surgeons, in the family. Her father was a neurosurgeon. In his youth he studied in four different countries and for a long time he lived in Canada. He could have gone anywhere with his skills, but eventually he decided to return to Gaza. There he married a colleague, 24 years his junior, an Indonesian-Palestinian radiologist, thought to be unable to have children. It must have been a match made in heaven, because they had four children in quick succession. Now all of them were dead, except for Asada.
After 14 displacements Asada no longer has any possessions, other than the clothes she’s wearing and her grandmother’s key. It’s the key to her house in Lod. Her aunt lost all her children in the first bombardment. Every day she prayed to be killed as well. She got her wish when she was struck in the head by an Israeli bullet. She had tried to get to an injured boy lying in the middle of the street. From that moment on Asada had been alone. At first she tried to make friends, but the sight of humans started to disgust her after witnessing so many deaths and mangled bodies.
For the last three months she’s lived in a bombed out ruin. The locals don’t go near, because they think the place is cursed. Something terrible’s happened here, more terrible than the usual gore. She doesn’t know what and she couldn’t care less. What’s important is that nobody dares to come here. She’s lost 20 pounds. She doesn’t get her period anymore, which is convenient given the circumstances. When she is very tired she has to fight off a voice that claims the devil has impregnated her. She doesn’t get to drink much, so she lives in that haze of permanent dehydration.
Every morning and every evening she presses a kiss on her grandmother’s key. Her idea is that this is the only thing she was allowed to keep, because it’s a message. She is meant to survive and return to her grandmother’s house in Lod.
Now those who murdered her family from the sky are standing in front of her. Ready to murder her too, but not before they have some fun with her. She knows what to say.
‘My grandmother was raped by a soldier on your side in 1948. She was one year younger than me at the time. Out of that rape my father was born. We could be blood relatives.’
Though statistically very nearly impossible that there is any link between her and her attackers, the trick works. The soldiers zip up their pants. Cursing, but they do.
The soldier asks: ‘Is that key the real deal?
She nods.
‘We won’t touch you, but you have to fork over that key.’
‘You will have to rip it out of my cold hands’, she says.
Five soldiers use her for target practice.
Her last thought is that the key opens the gates to heaven.
She guards her grandmother’s key until the very last moment, swallowing the key before the soldiers open fire. It doesn’t even hurt.
She dies, but she wasn’t raped.
And that’s a victory.
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The Confessor 