Story for performance #206
webcast from Sydney at 08:09PM, 12 Jan 06

at night through a gap
Source: Abraham Rabinovich, ‘Slick Olmert needs gravitas’, The Australian online, 12/01/06.
Writer/s: Marina Warner

The moon was up higher in the sky than she’d sailed since…oh, a long time ago and I could see her through the crooked blind, sliced into pieces and falling in stripes like Blake’s tiger turned silver bright, no longer daylight golden, across my bed in Room 9.12 where I was lying with white and luminous fluids dripping into me from upside down vessels like fishing floats; I was in their net, scooped up from the lower depths. Being saved from drowning wasn’t altogether comfortable, but it wasn’t the moon who kept me awake. The awkwardness of being tethered in the net of those feeds and liquids slithering into me made blissful, dreamless sleep elusive, and besides, the moon was rousing others and I could hear them at the nurses’ station, murmuring to one another and now and then giving a quick laugh or a snort….

It was the same every night—they chatted and hobnobbed and told tales to get through the time. But this night it was different. The moon was soaring and she was carrying us, the doctors and the nurses on night duty in their pools of light by their monitors, the orderlies and the ambulance drivers in the sumps down below waiting the call and the doctors and surgeons and police officers in A. & E. looking out for the stabbers and the stabbed, the gunshot wounds and their makers, and me suspended in my high computerised net of a bed, she was carrying all of us somewhere.

—and the doctor from Libya had finished ribbing Grace the nurse from Ghana about her love of Lemongrass Chicken soup and Pad thai which were her favourite foods that she dreamed of and couldn’t get in this damned hospital which had every ECG and MRI and CGI machine you could think of but no kitchen or cafeteria for a hungry nurse at night. And then the youngest of the nurses who was from Bangalore and had very gentle, tiny fingers like a clever daughter in a fairy tale broke through their chaffing and asked Grace how she arrived in this country in the first place to develop a taste for such exotic cuisine so much and Grace laughed and said,

‘You’re not supposed to ask that kind of question, you know! You’re not meant to think I don’t belong here! Who’s to say my granddaddy didn’t live here a hundred years ago?

Then another voice broke in and she whispered, ‘I’ll tell you how I came here…’ and I could hear her even though she was speaking softly because the others all fell quiet around her and the moonlight stretched out silver cool and taut over them so that her voice travelled towards me like music over water in the summer in a park at dusk.

This was Maryam from Gaza. Her voice was changing, becoming deeper and older. She was saying…

‘Every day there were soldiers and explosions and aeroplanes overhead. We still got our children to school, through the checkpoints and the rest of it. But one day when they went to school, the explosions were coming in closer. We were used to it, but that day…well…the soldiers came…’

She was speaking quietly, with a kind of detachment. ‘I lost my children.

‘The men came in running to our house; one had the traditional scarf tied round his head so you couldn’t see his face. He was followed by another man, who had his scarf half pulled off, so we could see his eyes all startled and hot in his head. They waved us out of our house with their guns, they waved us down the street, away from the direction of the school. We tried to stand up to them and stay where we were, we tried to dodge them and run to fetch the children but they screamed the troops were out there on the attack, house to house. Everyone was shouting. Running and screaming and the smell of bombs everywhere. You never see that smell on the news or the smell that comes with it—like here in hospital…sometimes down in surgery. Insides. The smell of hurt animals. Blood and flesh and fire. You know all this.’

There was a murmur from the others.

I heard a voice—it was Grace’s, saying, ‘Maryam when was this? How long ago?’

‘Look at me and you see how long it’s been since the intifada started, and I’ve been here since…but I’m going to tell you…’

A bell rang from one of the beds…Ahmad the night duty doctor broke in, ‘Hey don’t get to the end before I’m back…’

But Maryam went on, ‘We women who had been rounded up spent that first night together, in an old garage for bus repairs, and in the morning when the soldiers marched us to a camp and told us all to look for our families and our children and regroup, I didn’t find Raja and Leila. Many of the others with us had got separated too. It went on like this, for one day and night after another. It seemed the longest time. Wherever we were taken, I asked about them, the others asked about theirs. Sometimes someone found their mother, but for us there was no word, just a huge silence in the middle of the explosions of the bombs and the rumble of the artillery and the endless wailing inside us. It was hard to think of ways of describing children so that someone might recognise them: what do you say? My son is six, he has dark curly hair…My daughter is eight she is so pretty your heart melts…She has a chip on her first front tooth from falling over as she was running one afternoon…

‘They were lost, I had lost them. Or had I gone missing? Had our lives left us and walked away? Had we all gone missing from our lives?

‘We were kept moving, drawing farther and farther away from our home and our street and the school where they were going when I last saw them.

‘One lunchtime, on the eighth day it was, I had to show my ID as usual to one of the guards and I had the idea then.

‘From that day on, I cut up my face in little pieces—first one eye then the other, then the mouth one corner then the other, then the nose and the hair, and I left the bits behind me in the places they turned into holding camps for us with anyone who would go along with my doing this and take a piece. It was one of the medical volunteers who pinned it to his own badge that my Leila saw. She was lining up for an inspection and she said to Raja (she had kept a strong grip on him)—‘look there’s Mother—that’s Mother’s eye….’

‘That way we found one another again. It took another five days but we were re-united. After that terrible gap, a gap like an eternal night.’

It was the time when the moon starts sliding down the sky. The tiger stripes across my bed were contracting and fading, and I was feeling drowsier now, as I heard Grace and the others at the nurses’ station sigh and kind of chuckle with satisfaction.

’But you still haven’t explained how you got here, darling,’ I then heard Grace say, banteringly.

‘That will have to keep for another night’, said Ahmad, yawning. ‘Nearly time for the day shift to come on. Are you on tomorrow, Maryam?’

But there was no reply. Or else I was too near sleep to hear.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Marina Warner.