How Do You Take a Little of Your Life?

How Do You Take A Little of Your Life?

By Sara Alwadia

Translated by Sarah Enany

I never knew that homes had a heart.

I thought a home was walls and doors and windows, a place to return to at a day’s end; to take off our shoes, to leave all our weariness outside.

I never knew that home had its own unique smell. I never knew that the sound of the key in the lock imparts a reassurance that is like nothing else. That the corridor we traverse dozens of times each day has its own memory—

—or that things we think will always be there, simply because they have all been there, can be taken away.

We had to leave.

But how can one bring along a little bit of one’s life?

My mom and dad didn’t want a lot of clothes and papers. They wanted their home—its supports, its walls, its memories, the tree my granddad planted before I ever knew the meaning of the word “home.”

How can I pick which jacket to take along when the rest of my clothes are part of me?

How can I leave behind my bed? My room? The pictures on the walls? My old notebooks, the ones I wrote things in that I never thought I’d need to keep in order to remind myself of who I used to be?

How can I leave behind the dining table our family gathered around?

Each of us picked up our small bag, and we left.

But we didn’t leave alone.

We left accompanied by the smell of coffee; my mother’s voice calling to us from the far end of the house; the sunbeam that fell on the floorboards to announce the start of a new day; keys; photographs; so much that can never fit into a suitcase.

Many more things were lost along the way.

Or maybe they stayed behind, back there in the house, in the rooms that crumbled along with everything else.

Since that day, we have only had a temporary address.

The little things are no longer little.

A loaf of bread has become our dearest wish; a cup of coffee a luxury; a full night’s sleep without being awakened by fighter jets a distant dream; even a full charge on a phone battery has become an indulgence.

We didn’t ask for much.

We wanted a day without the smell of gunpowder; a quiet night; a sky full of stars, not fighter jets; a morning when we could open our eyes and find everything where it belonged.

But nothing stayed where it belonged.

Days went by in fear of something greater than fear:

we were afraid of forgetting.

Of forgetting the shape of our window; where my mom and dad used to sit; the color of the door; the sound of the key turning in the lock.

We thought the house would stay there, and so we would not need to commit it to memory.

We never knew that things could disappear all at once, and that memory alone could become the only place to come home to.

This is why I keep going back to old photographs;

I feel that I’m not just looking at them,

but going back—

back to the spot in our house where I used to sit, without fearing that what I once documented might become a document of what is no longer there.

Perhaps this is why photographs have become memories that hold within them homes and voices; people at whose doors we can knock no more. Tiny details that only we remember.

And so I fear for what remains.

I fear that, one day, there will be nothing to show us that we were once there.

We may not have been able to take the house with us when we left; but we can carry a trace of it,

sometimes, a photo

a text,

a story we tell,

a book we open years later—only to find, in its pages, between its lines—

the scent of a place that no longer exists.

That is why I write.

Not to preserve what happened.

To preserve what was before it happened.

To give the house another place to live,

the uprooted tree another place to set down roots.

Because some things don’t deserve this death.

Not, at least, in our memory.

Sara Alwadia is a Palestinian writer from Gaza who finds in writing a way to make sense of life, one feeling and one thought at a time. She is drawn to the stories hidden in ordinary moments and the words we sometimes struggle to say. Through writing, she seeks to give a voice to what lives quietly within us.

Sarah Enany is a writer, literary translator, and a professor in the English Department of Cairo University. She is a recipient of the Banipal Prize for Literary Translation for her translation of The Girl with Braided Hair (Hoopoe Fiction, 2020). She has translated several operas including the acclaimed sung versions of Les Miserables and Mozart’s The Magic Flute into Egyptian Arabic, and Sayed Higab’s libretto for the opera Miramar into English. She is also the translator of Witness to War and Peace: Egypt, the October War, and Beyond, The Book Smuggler, and the Jewish Muslim trilogy (all AUC Press).