Seeing Them See the Sea

“Ana bahib al-bahar”, I love the sea, the girl said. They were walking, stumbling along on the sand, four children and one grown woman. Backs, shoulders and hands were laden with backpacks and bags, the woman’s hand and shoulder were pulled down by the weight of a blue picnic cooler, and a red sun-shade protruded from an underarm of one of the children. Halfway, in the middle of all this discomfort, 12-year old Nur stopped in her tracks and announced that she loved the sea. “Ana bahib al-bahar,” she said, and all the other four who were walking, stumbling, stood too and stared at her and then at the sea, still a bit far but already lying there right in front of them, and Nur just stood there and stared at it. The drive from her village to the beach lasted no more than an hour-and-a-quarter, but she had never seen the sea before, neither she nor her eight-year old brother Mohammad, nor her cousins, ten-year old Samir and seven-year old Yasmine. These vast marvelous expanses, the waves breaking and foaming and disappearing and nimbly gathering to the shore, the intense blue under the afternoon sun whose heat was now receding, the breeze fluttering over arms and faces– all this goodness and beauty were not meant for them or their parents under the circumstances into which they were born.

The woman and the four children with her had crossed the military checkpoint near the entrance to their village in her red Ford-Fiesta without stopping or being stopped. She had no idea what the rules and regulations said in these parts: were children, too, subject to the orders written on the large red sign in front of the checkpoint, announcing that this crossing is exclusively for Israelis? No, she really didn’t know – perhaps children were allowed even if they were not Israelis? There was this kind of rumor going around, she even heard about this in the village, but she still felt her stomach contract and her knees tremble as the car approached the soldiers’ post. She feared that the whole nice plan for this Friday would simply end, vanish like a dream, while the children – and she, too, in fact – had counted the minutes until it became real, so their parents told her. Indeed, when she had arrived at the village they were already waiting for her below the steps to their house with their bundles, tense, not a single smile nor the hint of one on their faces, stiff with tension and uncertainty.
Yes, she too was nervous, afraid they would be stopped at the checkpoint, instructed to pull over, asked questions and sent back. For a moment, as they left the village, she thought of telling the children not to speak Arabic until they passed the checkpoint, as if they knew any other language. But they didn’t utter a word anyway, just sat there dumbstruck as she slowly approached the soldiers’ post, her stomach contracted and her knees trembling, lowered her window, waved to the armed soldier who signaled her to slow down even more and perhaps come to a full stop, but she only slowed down much more, gave him a broad amicable smile and a nod, assuring him that both of them, he and she, belonged to the same side, to this nation, the lords of this land, all of which the soldier presumed anyway in view of the car and the face of its driver, and he returned her smile and greeting, and still asked: “Everything alright?” making sure her accent was the right one, too, not just her looks. “Fine, great,” she answered, but when he bent his head to peek into the car window and get a look at the rest of the passengers, she already stepped on the accelerator.
Come on, move, why pester me, let live, she said, or rather meant, and the soldier backed off to the side, was almost shoved back, and she drove on and gave a slanted look at the rear-view mirror and saw that he didn’t care. “Ugh, who’s got the patience for all these annoyances,” she thought. And into the silent space of the car she called out: “We’re in Israel!” and surprised herself with the cozy feeling she had at the sight of all the greenery as they approached Mevo Beitar and Begin Park, instead of the mucky yellowish tone of the bare hills and ranges to the east. “We got across, we’re in Israel! Going to the beach!”

All this was over. Now they had already left checkpoint country far behind and even crossed the pay-booth at the entrance to Nitzanim Park, where no one wanted to check who and what they were, this woman and the quiet children with her, and only received the entrance fees she paid. And she had already found a parking space in the large car park at this beach, and all five of them had extricated themselves and their things from the car and began to step silently across the sand towards the water.
It was then that Nur stopped in her tracks and declared: “Ana bahib al-bahar”.

And the woman too stood and looked at her and at the three other children who stopped as well, in different postures, as though playing “Statues” when the child standing with his face to the wall turns around to see who is moving and will be out of the game. But the woman found herself carefully looking at the four of them in order to fully experience the moment, its richness and meaning, the moment she had looked forward to so eagerly since the trip was planned: to see them seeing the sea for the very first time ever. Eyes wide open with surprise, beaming, lips slightly parted, a thin white thread of saliva trickled from the corner of Yasmine’s mouth, the youngest of all, apparently she hadn’t swallowed, Mohammad’s large dark eyes grew almost round with wonder, Samir looked as though he was about to burst out laughing, while Nur, the eldest, almost an adolescent, was serious, the expression on her face longing, dreamy, her eyes looking far off.

That moment probably grew very long only in her own memory. In fact they must have hurried to find a spot among all the many people on the beach, the sun- shades and chairs and mats and Styrofoam coolers and children and dogs and inflatable rings in all shapes, colors and sizes, among the sounds of portable radios and the clicks of wooden rackets hitting balls and shouts and talking in Hebrew and Russian and English, which would soon be mixed with the Arabic voices of Nur and Mohammad and Yasmine and Samir – for a little while they would still speak quietly among themselves so as not to stand out, but later they would forget and shout and yell at each other in these guttural tones that the elderly woman who accompanied them had such a hard time learning to pronounce correctly.
They fixed the red sun-shade pole in the sand, spread a blanket in its shade, and the woman told the children that here was their camp and they could put down their packs and bags and take off their shoes and go over to the changing stalls and change, and come back right away and not go off without telling her and getting permission. They came back one by one, still obedient and disciplined. Nur now wore jeans and a tee-shirt – she was only twelve and already obeyed the rules imposed on her gender in her society. Samir returned wearing Bermuda shorts down to his knees, under which, when he finally began to scamper and skip around, a broad stripe of dark red underpants showed at his hips, giving him a rather fashionable look. Only Mohammad and Yasmine came back in bathing apparel – he in short phosphorescent green bathing trunks and she in a yellow-green bathing suit decorated with a kind of yellow skirt so short that it could by no means be regarded as concealing anything, perhaps quite the contrary: a mischievous provocation meant to reveal rather than conceal, display what there actually is for the time being: the cute body of a healthy little girl, still retaining some of its baby fat.

Now that this detailed description is being written from memory based on the hasty notes she took soon after the trip, that is to say a long time ago – Nur has already married since then and is about to conclude her university chemistry studies, Samir dropped out of school and is working at a garage as a mechanic’s apprentice, Mohammad is a high-school senior, and has grown up considerably since he appointed himself full caregiver to his elder brother who was seriously injured in a traffic accident, and Yasmine has grown into adolescence and is not seen out of the house with her head uncovered – now that the woman realizes her memory has retained even more details, she wonders why she watched them so intensely back then, so precisely that their movements and speech and clothing were preserved in her mind down to such fine details. She has no doubt that aside from being curious as to how their parents equipped them to spend their first trip ever to the beach, that careful gaze of hers had a practical purpose as well: to etch in her mind the appearance of every single one of them and remember special marks so that she wouldn’t lose them, god forbid, so that if they suddenly discover their freedom in these expanses of sand and sea and get separated and distant and run off each in a different direction, she would be able to catch them at least with her eyes, if not actually with her hands, which really wished at the time to hold them on a leash somehow for fear she wouldn’t be able to keep her promise to their parents to bring them back home that evening safe and sound. She made them this promise without being asked and they assured her they were not at all worried – why worry, after all the children are in her hands, Nur’s father said and spread his own hands a little and then placed his right hand over his heart, and they know they can rely on her as if she were their own mother. What nonsense, she thought, when had she ever had four children to look after at the beach, and what’s more – children who don’t swim?
In the hours that followed, her careful gaze indeed helped her search and find them: The jeans and blue shirt on Nur’s slim body, standing out of course among the bare girls on the beach, and Yasmine’s very short yellow skirt, and the red strip of Samir’s red underpants, and Mohammad’s phosphorescent green bathing trunks, he who of all four was the one to disappear from her view several times as he was no different from several other children in green bathing trunks. One, two, three, four, she repeatedly counted them at first, one, two, three, four… No, just three, where’s Mohammad? – “Mohammad’s running over there,” Nur pointed. One, two, three, four… No, that’s not Samir, where’s Samir? – “There’s Samir, buried in the sand,” Yasmine showed her…
But she also recalls, she remembers and knows that not just curiosity nor some practical motive alone caused her to observe so carefully and to linger more and more over the four children, it was a yearning, a desire to see these children as normal children, whose smooth skin, shiny with sea water, was visible, children whose ice cream mixed with sand was getting smeared over their flushed faces by the kiosk, simply children at the beach. For at home, in their village – where they are also simply normal children, in fact, she practically never saw them this way. From her point of view they were first of all part and parcel of that warped and distorted reality of a place fenced in with barbed wire and military jeeps driving to and fro along its main street, a place where armed soldiers often stop children on their way home from school to check if their hands don’t show traces of hurled stones… a place that… a place where…

On that Friday they soon mixed in with other children at the Nitzanim beach, throwing sand and shells with them at the jelly-fish that drifted to the beach to die there without arousing anyone’s compassion, and throwing sand and splashing water at each other, and then rolling down the sand dunes, and then their ice cream and popsicles got smeared all over their faces, and then the small group scattered and dispersed again and again. They really discovered their freedom, each in their own way.
She found Yasmine sitting on the sand and decorating with sea shells a little sand castle she had built. She saw Samir, a sturdy but short boy, lying on his side, feet in the shallow water, his head leaning on his elbow, quietly looking at the wet sand and staying like that for a long time. She watched Nur from behind, standing at the water line, perhaps a yearning, dreamy look on her face again, her eyes gazing into the distance, longing for promise of something else, new, exciting. And her eyes caught Mohammad as he ran over the flat rocks in the water, ran and bent and looked down and picked something out of the sea. She approached him and saw a little fluttering fish at his feet, and he picked it up and the fish fluttered in his hand.
“Put it right back in the water or it’ll die. Hurry! Back in!” she yelled at him angrily, suddenly she became hysterical. And the child was frightened and finally threw his meager prey back in the water. She peeped for a moment at the place where the fish dived among the rocks, and didn’t dare check whether he was back in his own habitat to live, or to die.

“See, I brought you all of them back alive and well,” she told the many family members who gathered immediately around the red Ford-Fiesta, out of which the four children quickly scattered and vanished, while she lingered in it for another moment to calm down a bit from the effort of driving to the sound of the children’s songs and chants and clapping that filled the car on the way back – how much more convenient was the silence that filled the car when they drove in the other direction – and then she moved and pushed and lifted her behind from the driver’s seat and got out a bit heavily, no longer nimble. Why not change this car for a higher one? She thought before she turned proudly to everyone around her: “See, alive and well.”
Night had already fallen, darkness was upon the land beyond the checkpoint when they got back. No soldier stood there checking passengers in this direction, from Israel into the West Bank, her stomach didn’t flinch, her knees didn’t quiver. Just her mind nearly burst from all the tension that had left her now, back safely with all four children – none of them got lost, or drowned. But unlike her, apparently none of their family members feared for their safe return. Not relief, it was radiance she saw, the many faces in the yard of that village home were actually radiant, in the bright light of its lamp.
“You have no idea what an important thing you did,” the father of Samir and Yasmine told her in Hebrew, and turned to deliver a short speech about how important it was to show these children that they could be among Jewish children, and look like them and play like them, how important it was that they grow up not just to hate. Besides, she made their dream come true, seeing the sea, “and they won’t ever forget this, they’ll never forget you did this for them. Thank you, a thousand thanks.”
She has a hard time reading these words now. Why? Are they naïve? Pathetic? And perhaps at that time they still expressed a sincere, real hope, which since then has already abandoned her heart as well as the heart of that speaker, he who is already a grandfather to children who are still forbidden to go to the beach, one hour’s drive from their village.

Chicago University Press, 2019