From Reham Al-Saba’s ‘I Am at Your Door’

From among the rubble of homes in the Shaboura camp in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, the protagonist rises to confront the ashes of memory, saying: “I saw the hideous red flowing over the gray ash… and I knew that war leaves survivors with nothing but the poison of memory.” I Am at Your Door was written as a last resort for survival, as another form of life. In its pages, we read: “Is there anything more beautiful than writing while you are being exterminated? And here, I mean the ugly meaning of beauty.”

I Am at Your Door

By Reham Al-Saba

Translated by Dennis Farnsworth

For you

And no one else

Have you ever woken up in the middle of an explosion?

Have you ever been stirred awake by an earthquake, wondering what happened?

I got up at exactly quarter past six in the morning, drowning in shrapnel and ash. It was difficult to breathe, and even more difficult to see what was around me. My heartbeats. I could hear them clearly, as if my heart were about to explode.

My nose was filled with the smell of gunpowder, smoke, and something else, something chemical, and each time I tried to breathe, all I drew in was smoke and gunpowder. It was like drowning—trying to catch a breath, but inhaling only water.

I didn’t understand what had happened and coughed violently. Had our house been the target? Did I die? Was I hallucinating?

After a couple of minutes, a crowd began to form, and I realized I could still hear. At least I wasn’t dead.

Still breathless, I didn’t know how I had gotten to wherever I was, but I was assured by my memory that I had not fallen asleep in the middle of the street the night before. I had been in my bed, at home, and it seemed I had been thrown out onto the street along with my children who I’d hugged before going to sleep.

People helped us to our feet, our bodies cracking, and moistened our dry mouths with water. I looked at my children without recognizing them, knowing now I had suffered a temporary loss of memory. The women of the camp shouted at me, “Thank God you and your children are okay!”

My children!

I have children?! Who even are you? And why am I here, in the street?

I remembered that I was internally displaced and had been staying in my grandfather’s home in al-Shaboura refugee camp in Rafah. I’d come there with my family from Gaza City because of the war.

People’s cries rang in my ears, making me dizzy. My eyes mirrored the faces of my young children as they watched, utterly calm, as people tried to save us and the rest of the family from under the ruins and the rubble. Their eyes were red and wide, and their faces scared. Gray. My lips trembled, and my nose was blocked by the smells. Gunpowder had settled in there forever. My bodily senses could not move past it, much less my memory.

People began to gather on top of the ruins as though they were hills, and I could see them pulling people from underneath. I recognized some of their faces, but many others I did not, like the ones of my mother and father.

Can a person really forget their parents’ faces?

I saw red. So much of that hideous color spreading all over the gray scene.

I remember seeing Mahmoud, my husband, as a stranger when he rushed to embrace us after we had survived certain death. Yes, I discovered I had a husband, too.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“They bombed the house next to us.”

“Who died?”

“We’re all ok, but the rubble from the house that was bombed fell on Laila’s room.”

“Who’s Laila?”

“Your sister.”

“She died?”

“I don’t know.”

I don’t know how I could ask these blunt, harsh questions, since I am usually the type of person who needs to prepare the ground before asking difficult things. Mahmoud’s answer begged a new question, like What do you mean I don’t know? Instead, I said nothing.

Unbalanced and trembling, I finally managed to take control and hold myself together despite the dizziness, setting my feet firmly and rising like someone who knew their place. I had to force myself to focus. Not to lose it.

I surveyed the structure of my grandfather’s simple house, trying to pinpoint Laila’s room. When I found it, I rushed over, hurtling towards it. There were people on top, and with all my rage I shouted:

“Get away! Get away! My sister is under you!”

***

“Laila! What are you feeling?”

“I’m thirsty.”

This was the first thing I asked once I’d gotten to the nearest point where we could hear each other. All I wanted was to keep her from being scared because no one could understand what it’s like to be trapped under rubble.

Laila’s voice was choked, muffled and trembling. But she was strong, and she would endure. Survive. We would find a way to save her and get her out from under the rubble.

I went over to Mahmoud, thinking through a way to get her something to drink. We considered snaking down a thin hose, hoping it might reach her mouth, but we couldn’t manage it, because the concrete had stacked up unevenly over her body. Remnants of roofs and pillars made it impossible for us to lift her out with our bare hands, even with help from the men of the camp. All we could do was lift the heavy stones, leaving Laila thirsty.

For the first seven hours, we were unable to get a crane, although we were promised that one would arrive later. We lived on that hope, and I told Laila to stay strong. No, I didn’t tell her. I shouted it, when she said in a muffled voice:

“Seems like I’m going to die here.”

I left the children with my husband, who set up camp for us near the remains of my grandfather’s house, leaving everyone to sit with Laila in her fear, loneliness, and gloom. I sat down near her, tried to entertain her, tease her, and when our voices met, I asked:

“Why did you come back to this city?”

“Look for my phone,” she said. “I’m begging you.”

Midday had just begun to turn into afternoon, which was good, because we could search for the phone before darkness fell. But since winter days were so short, I began calling out to neighbors and passersby, asking them to help me look for Laila’s phone. They all came to the call, and we searched with the precision of bees, inspecting the site of my grandfather’s house and its surrounding alleyways, raking through earth and gravel. We scoured every inch for even the remnants of a phone, found nothing, and by the time I returned to tell Laila I hadn’t found it, the sun was already setting.

She said nothing. Her voice didn’t reach me. I shouted: “Laila.. Laila!”

She didn’t respond, so I called out to the others for help. Together and in one voice, we called her name and waited for her to say something. Finally, her low and pained voice reached us:

“Ahh.”

How precious that ahh!

“Are you hurt?” one of the men from the neighborhood asked her.

“Yes.”

“If the crane doesn’t come, you won’t survive,” he said in a deep voice.

I turned to him, wanting nothing more than to tear him apart. But he walked away, and so did the others, as night cast its darkness upon us.

At the point where my voice met Laila’s, I set up for the night and tried to speak to her. She said nothing, except for: “My phone.. the notes.”

Her persistent calls for her phone, despite the rubble crushing and pounding her, drove me to start rummaging beside me. Something inside me pushed me to keep digging, and, in the end, I found it. Though the screen was broken, the phone was still working. I yelled out that I had found it, and it was the only time she managed a full sentence.

“Read the last note.”

I knew that it took all her strength to speak those words, because every breath she drew at that point was a miracle.

The phone’s battery was nearly dead, but it was enough to read for a while. Perhaps in the morning, I could charge it at one of the stores with solar panels. Unlocking the phone was easy, since Laila had shared her passcode with me. It was my birthday. 15290. I opened the note and began to read.

In his epic poem The Divine Comedy, Italian poet Dante Alighieri imagined Satan stationed in his Inferno at the center of Earth, beneath the city of Jerusalem.

The Inferno is a vast, dark abyss with nine circles, through which we move and which move around us, as we stagger our way through its depths.

Dante’s Inferno began on a Friday.

Mine began on a Saturday.

1. Circle of Limits

What we all yearn for is to feel safe. With all my pain, I longed for it, even though I knew the safety I had forced myself to feel over the previous years was completely unreal. I was feeling danger, and all my past selves came back to me, shouting in voices impossible to ignore:

Laila. You need to escape. Run back to the city you first called home.

“Amen,” I said.

***

As I returned to the city I first called home, I passed the crossing I had once inhabited. I got a taxi and headed to the house. When I crossed the city’s borders, I remembered the moment Dante entered his Inferno. The gates to Hell had been engraved with words I could not clearly remember, except for a line that said:

“Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into eternal woe.”

I’m not Dante, and I can neither judge others nor put them in circles where they wage the wars of the human soul. No. I’m not Dante. But, from the moment I passed the entry, I knew I had entered my own personal Inferno, where I would live and be trapped, where I would remember myself staggering between its circles.

I’m not just one Laila, either, but am inhabited by all my past selves. I don’t know if it was I who created them, raised them, and granted them the right and ability to dominate me. Perhaps they were born with me. Or maybe I created them in order to justify my own shortcomings, to be able to say that it was not me, but them. I was a toy for them to play with, but even so, I often succeeded in influencing them, setting down boundaries, getting them under control.

I was struck by the new and paved roads, which were nothing like they’d been before I left. They used to be filled with potholes and speedbumps, custom-made by the residents, each according to their whims. One would fashion a speedbump out of uneven concrete, while another laid down thick, doubled ropes. It used to be rare to find even a small spot on these roads that wasn’t cracked or bombed out, and it surprised me to find that they were now new, well laid, and safe for driving. By the traffic light that separated two governorates, I noticed a child feeling his way over a wall with two sentences painted on it:

“Children have a right to education and to be protected from violence.”

“We are all against child labor.”

It was obvious the child vaulting over the wall worked as a beggar, and it reminded me of what it had been like for me when I begged as a child. The memory shone in my mind, and I saw myself, little Laila, in that child’s place. I called out to him and told my driver to wait.

“What’s your name, habibi?”

“My name’s Ahmed.”

“Your name is beautiful. I don’t have any money to give but I just wanted to tell you to pay attention to your studies. As you can see, it says right there on the wall that you have a right to learn, not to work.”

“Get out of here.”

In truth, I wasn’t talking to the child, but my own memory. I was trying to find my way back to the memory of a time when a man came up to me, said that my name was beautiful, and told me that I had to pay attention to my studies. I smiled at Ahmed and laughed, knowing I was rambling at him with words that meant nothing, using him to reach a moment of bliss in my own memory.

I left the child, returned to the car, and started for home once again.

At every crossroads, metaphorical or not, coincidence glimmers, always leaving the ultimate decision not to me, but to chance. It is coincidence, then, that draws me toward decisions that have already been made, or to those which soon will be.

Sometimes, I call myself a daughter of chance.

My mother had tried to get rid of the burden of me when I was a fetus in her belly. I didn’t fit into the family equation, nor was I expected or prepared for economically. The pregnancy happened by chance, and I forced my presence on that family, refusing to be aborted, ignored or deprived the pleasures of life. So I clung fiercely to my mother, almost killing her.

After nine and a half months I kicked the warm womb and got out silently, with open eyes, shocked by the blinding and new white world around me. I even forgot to cry like other children do, until the doctor jolted me awake, slapping me on my right thigh–this is how my mother told me the story–until I screamed and kept on screaming for nearly an hour before the doctor regretted what he had done, justifying himself to my father:

“The slap wasn’t that hard. I swear.”

My parents had also forgotten to call the adhan in my ear, and perhaps that’s why I’m inhabited. Inhabited by my past selves.

Some people who knew that my father had forgotten to call the adhan in my ear had told me that I would be gathered up with the disbelievers on the Day of Judgement. My father repeatedly tried to refute this, saying that the hadith that mentions calling the adhan in the ear of a newborn is weak, or that he had in fact called it and that the rumors weren’t true. Still, people went on saying it.

Since my earliest days, I have staggered inside myself. What my heart has longed for is not the direction in which my body has moved, and, over the years, life has pulled me between what my heart desires and what my mind wants. Between what my eyes follow and what my path denies.

My chance encounter with that child felt like my memory playing tricks on me. This chance made me remember my seven year-old self hearing the word decision for the first time, when it came out of the mouth of the electricity man, who announced that there had been a decision to cut the power to our house.

That day, I understood decision meant an idea being put into motion, and this was when I decided to work as a beggar. To be honest, I don’t fully understand the connection between the electricity man and my decision to beg. But such are memories.

My family wasn’t poor, but we weren’t well-to-do, either. I didn’t even know the meaning of social status, but I had encountered so many children working like that that I thought it was a job designed especially for children.

I had been feeling bored by the summer holiday, sitting around at home, confined to the TV, which was controlled by whoever was older than me. By the time it was my turn, the cartoons would have already finished.

I remembered how, that morning, I had gotten ready to go down to the street. It wasn’t the first time I had hit the street, of course; I already knew our neighborhood by heart. But that day was different. I crouched down by the flowerpots near the doorstep, which my mother had set there to grow mint and basil. She had neglected them, and the soil looked like ash, so I gathered a handful in my palm, and covered my face and hair with it. Then I rubbed my feet in the ground, spreading the dust all around me, making myself look like one of those children we feel sorry for. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to deserve pity.

The memories of begging, brought forth by the child, reminded me of many other details, like the time a pedestrian handed me money and asked:

“What’s your name, honey?”

“My name’s Laila.”

“Your name is beautiful. Take care of yourself and don’t forget to study. It will make your life better than what it is right now. Children have rights, like education and to be safe from violence.”

At the time, I didn’t understand anything he had said after your name is beautiful, and I didn’t care about any of it except the money.

One memory drags out another…

Of course, I began to wonder about the reason I had been given such a beautiful name. I came home that day, passing through the narrow living room, which the sun was struggling to get into. I saw my mother, who took no notice of how dirty I was as she swayed gently to the tunes of Mohammed El Mougy in his great Kamel El Awsaf, sung by Laila Ghofran. When I got into the room she said, her eyes glued to the television, “I named you Laila because I love her.”

The name didn’t matter as much as Laila’s beauty and charm, with her black dress and dark red hair.

“Will I be pretty like her?”

“You’ll be prettier. You’ll be flawless – Kamel El Awsaf.”

From that moment, the song Kamel El Awsaf became my dearest companion, and whenever I was forced to walk my path, I would hum it.

“Those black eyes threw me off, they led me astray and made me a stranger. Oh, those black eyes.”

I think I fell in love with the lyrics more than I fell in love with Laila Ghofran.

Today, I am no longer that Laila. But I know that the lyric ‘they led me astray and made me a stranger’ was the first expression that made me fall in love with the Arabic language. In it, I found a beautiful metaphor for the act of love. After all, is it not the sharpest point of love that the lover becomes estranged from himself? Does he not drift deeper into his dream, compelled by a heart that dwells inside of him, freeing him from estrangement?

Yes, the eyes send us into exile, while the heart is the homeland. There is no doubt.

The car was still moving toward home, and memories of begging still flashed by, like my moments of rest at the edge of the red-and-white sidewalk. I used to consider the green traffic lights my time to take a break from begging, and, from the edge, I would look up and watch the passersby. I remembered a man walking by with his pregnant wife, and I had watched her round stomach and the dust-covered edges of her veil intently. I also remembered a man who was in his forties at the time, like my father, looking elegant and giving off a fresh scent of aftershave as he passed by. He was wearing the brown leather flip flops that separated the big toe from its four siblings and were well-known to the men and boys of my city. I remembered I had asked myself naively:

“All of that, and flip flops?”

There is no need to dwell on these memories of begging, which ended badly, when another child jumped on me and hit me, grabbing me by the hair and pushing me to the ground. According to him, I had taken his customers, and he said:

“Damn you if you ever come back to my territory.”

I didn’t know there was a question of territory, or other considerations, but he knew I was a threat. Despite my inexperience, I knew who I could ask for money, and, that day, I had mastered my work to the point that I could distinguish between the wealthy and the poor, between the wealthy but greedy and the well-to-do but generous. This did not seem to satisfy the other child.

The day of begging ended with me having a decent amount of money in my pocket, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was scared to try again, afraid the boy would hit me. I, who had never before felt a beating.

The truth is that the desire to beg returned after three days. It was a Friday, and the khatib at the mosque next door was shouting at the top of his voice, telling stories about historical battles between good and evil. I went down to the street, looking right and left, feeling safe because the other child was not there. I covered myself in dirt and stood by the crossroad, waiting for the red light so I could pass between the stopped cars.

After three attempts with three different cars, I made my way toward a fourth. Reaching my hand through the window, I nearly screamed as I was caught by my uncle. I raced home, trying to escape, but he followed me all the way and snitched on me to my mother and father.

This memory grips my heart. I hated that uncle, because he was the reason I tasted real pain when my mother hit me for the first time. Not only that, he also deprived me of the chance to go down to the street, even when all I wanted was to play with the neighbor’s children. However, as I got older, I realized the weight of what I had done. Begging was not a suitable profession for a child, as I once thought.

These were the small sins Laila committed before even undoing her braids. But they were not sins that made a person deserving of hell.

On the way back to my first home, I was pleased to see the cracked lights on the sides of the houses not working. They were installed once in a lifetime, and did not get fixed if broken, because the owners knew they would just end up getting broken again by some playing child. I was happy to see trash bags stacked by the doors to the houses, joyful at everything that had stayed the same. My happiness reached its peak when I saw a white butterfly pass by the car window, because I have always taken them as a sign of beauty and virtue. A good omen. Whenever I saw one, I would associate it with a decision I was about to make.

Since leaving home, I had seen no butterflies. All I had seen were flies.

I believed the white butterfly was a sign my decision to return was the right one. I believed it was, and I wanted it to be true. When I got to the front door, I looked at the house, then turned my head toward Abou Abeer’s closed shop. A verse of Mahmoud Darwish’s came to me.

“Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?”

I sighed, then continued,

“You killed me… And I forgot, like you, to die.”

There I was, like the woman soldier who shouted in the poem. The only difference was that I was shouting in my memories.

I heard one of them call out, looking down from the balcony: “Laila’s back!”

But the return offered no blessings.

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Dennis Farnsworth is an independent translator from Arabic to English and Swedish. He is a recent graduate of the CASA fellowship in Cairo, and is currently pursuing a degree at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. With a passion for language and literature, he founded Shoebox in 2024, a self-published magazine dedicated to fostering organic questioning and dialogue around literature, art and culture. To date, Shoebox has released five issues.