New Short Fiction: Suheir Daoud’s ‘The Miracle’

The Miracle

By Suheir Daoud

Translated by Leonie Rau

I was born after October 7, under the rubble. The cold was severe, and my mother’s voice was the only thing that covered me. I was about to start wailing, like any child, but when I heard my mother’s voice calling out for me and crying, I decided never to cry in my life. I held my mother’s hand instead of her holding mine—she was dying as she gave me life. I never got to know my family, and I was left to wonder whether I had siblings or a father or any family for the rest of my short life.

The strange thing was that I started to grow with astonishing speed. I grew a lot in the span of a few days, and my mind began to remember things that had happened 70 years ago, or even more. Maybe I was the miracle child, or maybe my mother gave birth to me in a time of miracles, I don’t know. I just saw myself running with the refugees towards the south, and my cat, which came from somewhere, ran with me. Then I saw myself in a tent, rain entering through all its windows, then waiting in a long queue for a spoon of soup. I went back to running from displacement to displacement.

I wanted from life just a single moment to draw my mother’s face, but time would not even allow me to remember it. I wanted to cry, but there wasn’t even time for crying. Everyone and everything around me turned into ash with the speed of lightning, and the smell of burning bodies filled my nose.

I was growing up with miraculous speed, until suddenly I felt as though I were high above everything, and everyone below became as small as toys I would never own.

At the gates of paradise, the Guardian Angel asked me for my name and address. I said I didn’t know, since I’d had no one to give me a name or an address. For the first time, I began to cry, but the Angel calmed me, saying: “Don’t cry, for I know you.”

I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. This was the happiest day of my death.

“Who am I?” I asked him.

“You are the martyr,” he told me.

Suddenly, I saw my mother, my father, my family, and my small kitten. God’s door was open wide, and the strange thing was that, all of a sudden, I returned to life as though I hadn’t died, and neither had my mother. And there was no displacement, no tents.

To my relief, I found the Angel nearby, so I asked him to please tell me what time I was in and whether I was dead or alive.

The Angel smiled and said: “You are the living martyr, and this is a time of miracles!”

Suheir Daoud is a Palestinian writer and professor of politics from Mi’ilya village in Western Galilee. She is the author of Through Ghazalah’s Windows, a memoir about growing up as a Palestinian woman in Israel. Originally written in Arabic, it was then translated into Italian and adapted into a play. Dr. Daoud has authored numerous articles and op-eds in Arabic, Hebrew, and English and has published four volumes of Arabic poetry and literature. Her book, Palestinian Women and Politics in Israel was published by the University Press of Florida. You can read her “Oh, My Nana” on The Common in Nashwa Nasreldin’s translation.

Leonie Rau is an editor at ArabLit.