Abu Hammam was the best kind of hole in the wall. Low ceilings, dirty linoleum floors, and perfectly cooked mensef, my favorite meal. A chaos of male voices greeted you as you walked in, coming from harried waiters and bronze-dark men in white smocks shouting over fryers and burbling pots, but I never felt uncomfortable eating there alone as a woman. You’d figure out on your own that you had to go upstairs if you wanted a seat, turning the corner on the landing into the quieter, lower-ceilinged room with plastic chairs and tables lined against the dingy walls, a few crooked pictures of the Dome of the Rock and the Kaaba hanging above them. Anything you ordered came with a hot stack of fluffy pita bread, which I never ate but took home for the birds, spreading crumbs around the soil near my olive trees.
When I first heard the restaurant’s name, I thought it meant Father of the Bathroom. Abu, father; hammam, bathroom – the only difference between the last name Hammam and the word for bathroom being a hard and soft H, a detail that was almost indiscernible to my immigrant ears. I only spoke Arabic when I visited Palestine and I’d lose a lot of the language in between visits. Abu Hammam referred, of course, to the family name, perhaps even a distant wing of my own extended family, the Hamamehs, who lived in McMansions in Texas and the outskirts of my village, Jiljilyya. Hamameh, incidentally, sounded equally to my ears like the word for pigeon, a euphemism for penis.
I ate mensef at Abu Hammam once a week, often alone but sometimes with Wadiyeh, who still hadn’t returned the case of DVDs I’d lent her on my previous trip to Palestine. Wadiyeh was an aspiring filmmaker who produced short interviews for an under-watched Ramallah news program. She was twenty-six, drank and smoked too much, and led men on, but I’m pretty sure she was still a virgin. She wore tight jeans and nude-colored heels, and when she leaned in to gossip or remark on a woman’s bad fashion, I could smell the powdery makeup she’d smoothed across her jawline like an airbrushed Lebanese TV presenter. I’d first met Wadiyeh at Beit Aneeseh, and soon we were sharing an argileh without wiping the nozzle, passing it lip to lip, pulling and exhaling minty vaporous smoke in the dimly lit garden of the historic single-story limestone house that served as the bar. At almost every table I saw people sharing the argileh nozzle, one passing it to the next with a cursory wipe.
It was Wadiyeh who’d invited me to the quasi-underground, loosely kept secret that was the monthly queer party for out and less out Palestinians hosted at some apartment, often one near the gouged-out construction site where Salam Fayyad’s people parked their cranes and bulldozers, or a big 1950s-era walk-up at the end of a street of newish, white limestone five-story buildings. I went every month, even though there were always too many white activists and upper-class European NGO workers, foreign queers and queer adjacents who were there for the anecdote, hoping to bed a native before their visa ended. This wasn’t really a problem, since Palestinians liked fucking foreigners just as much; it was easier being with people who wouldn’t be around for more than a few months or a year.
An hour into the party, both of us already drunk, Wadiyeh tried dragging me to some straight white guy’s apartment to drink and have a Monty Python marathon with a small breakaway group. I took her hand off my shoulder and flinched at her beer breath. I slurred that I was here to find someone to actually fuck, not play games with. She stared at me, taking in this breach of our friendship, but said nothing. She was too invested in her social standing to be seen spatting and left with the white guy and his group. I wasn’t sure if I meant what I said or if I just wanted to antagonize her, but when I thought about it, I decided I did mean it.
I scanned the room of frumpy couches, a makeshift dance floor and scruffy, curly-haired men dancing or absorbed in conversation. Almost everyone wore black T-shirts, which bored me, smoked and guffawed and tossed their curly hair, which bored me, and it was impossible to tell who was gay or straight, though everyone gave off straight vibes, which bored me. The Palestinian women all seemed cliquish, but I struck up conversation with a few and they were warm enough, if poised and too well mannered. One of them was supposedly Ghada Karmi’s daughter. She spoke with a very proper British accent and gave off super, super straight vibes. I wasn’t sure what she was doing there. Maybe she was into the novelty. I had my eyes on a woman I learned was from Haifa, with a buzz cut and maroon chandelier earrings and a black PFLP T-shirt, which suggested she would only be into other people who lived and breathed activism, wore black T-shirts and presented less femme than I did, even though I wasn’t that femme. But I was annoyed with myself for being most attracted to a Spaniard, Lucía, whom I’d met once or twice at daytime political rallies I happened upon at the Manara Square. She brought me over a glass of cheap white wine when she noticed mine was empty.
Lucía had mascara-framed hazel eyes and wavy caramel hair, and was wearing a red spaghetti-strap tank top and baggy jeans that hung loosely from her hips. There was a sprig of hair at her belly button. We sat on a cracked leather couch, drinking and sharing spit on her cigarette, when a small group of brawny Palestinian dykes walked in. They wore oversized T-shirts and shorts with high-top sneakers and had their hair bunched into tight buns or tucked under backwards-facing baseball caps. I couldn’t work out who was with whom based on where they sat, and Lucía and I played mix and match trying to work it out. Lucía said she had a long-term, long-distance girlfriend who wouldn’t leave her job in Madrid to join her in Palestine. She said they were ‘mostly open’, but seemed to be stretching the truth, and when I pressed, she admitted that the girlfriend hadn’t fully come around to the idea yet. I didn’t want to get involved in anything complicated, so I made an excuse and called a cab home.
At home in bed, I turned the brightness down on my phone and went through my nightly ritual of mindlessly checking the apps. I was surprised to see Rohit on offer again. I’d rejected her once, but through a glitch in the algorithm, she was back on my screen. I swiped through her pics and paused again on the one I’d paused on last time – her posing in a pale pink dress with one hand on the trunk of an olive tree wrapped in white string lights. I pinched my thumb and forefinger on her face like forceps and zoomed in. The name Rohit didn’t fit her. Just as Netanyahu was born Mileikowsky in Philadelphia, Rohit might’ve been a Kristen or Courtney in the suburbs of Detroit. Her name was an obvious attempt at Fertile Crescent indigenization, but it sounded more like an Indian man’s name, not a white girl’s.
Her profile said she was Middle Eastern and liberal, which made me laugh. She was a vegetarian open to either monogamy or non-monogamy. She didn’t have kids but might want them someday. Under the ‘I could probably beat you at’ question, where people typically wrote answers like baking or Call of Duty or movie trivia, Rohit wrote, ‘I could probably just beat you.’
I swiped to the next photo – she was lying on large rocks in full military uniform, her dark blonde hair tossed across the ground, a rifle resting diagonally across her chest. On a whim I swiped right and my screen flashed with the silhouette of a five-pointed star saying we’d matched. I was perplexed. I figured she was the type to swipe left on Palestinians just as I was the type to reject Israelis.
I went back to the photo of her in uniform and noticed she wore a thumb ring and had painted her nails white, which matched the Hebrew letters emblazoned on her black bulletproof vest. The next picture was off-center, Rohit sticking out her pointy tongue next to a crooked fragment of snow-covered trees. I wondered where she was, what country the picture had been taken in. That could have been my opening question, I thought. But I was never going to message her. I blew my nose and tossed the tissue across my bed. I had no interest in meeting her, and yet I took screenshots of most of her pictures. There was something degrading about saving the pictures I enjoyed. I set my phone on the nightstand near my head, where the screenshots might slither into my subconscious while I slept.
I had nothing to do the next day. I didn’t want to see Wadiyeh and own up to my shitty comment at the party, but I didn’t want to stay home either, so I drove to West Jerusalem to bathe in eye contact with people who hate my kind. To pass by random Rohits on the street and make them avert their gaze. I peered through the glass walls of clothing boutiques populated by Eastern European women with scalded skin, then walked down the street and played my repugnant but titillating game, pulling my mouth into that lipless smile reserved for strangers. I nodded unrequitedly to Israeli men and women who saw my Arab face and turned from it. If I intuited that it was relatively safe, that they wouldn’t lunge at me for a fistful of hair, I’d touch my tongue to the roof of my mouth twice to say ‘Ahlan’, Welcome, but meekly, so they couldn’t be sure if it was meant for them. If I was braver and said it louder, more directly and looking right at them, it’d receive a harsh glare or an epithet muttered to my back, which gave me a little thrill up my spine. The nastier the look, the more guttural their insult, the harder I’d giggle as I walked past them.
‘Don’t Speak’ played on a cafe’s tinny speakers near the park bench where I sat and uncapped my Thermos of arak, ice cubes hurtling forward as I tipped the rim to my lips and swigged the cold cloudy drink. I loosely hummed along to Gwen Stefani, wishing I had the guts to break out in song and bother the people on the street, like the hunched man in my neighborhood in Detroit who walked with a cane, wearing knock-off Oakleys and bulky headphones as he belted the lyrics to hard rock songs only he could hear.
I was starting to get a little buzzed from the arak, savoring the milky anise flavor and gaining the courage to hum louder in the sunlight surrounded by these people who despised me. I raised my voice and searched for someone’s stare to hold, but no one took the bait. They walked off like they were holding in a shit. I rose from the bench and walked back to my car, humming just loud enough to embarrass myself, provoking a few scowls from Israelis. My head swam and I heard the clink of the ice cubes jostling against the metal walls of the Thermos. I rode my nervous energy, singing quietly in Arabic now, but loudly enough to catch the attention of an elderly Orthodox couple with shopping bags sagging from their arms.
‘Lau samaht, atwaslak,’ I belted mockingly, staring at the man’s averted eyes, cracking myself up as I pulled my car door open and slid in, flooded with nerves as I started the engine.
My phone vibrated on the glass coffee table and woke me from my nap. I’d dreamt I was picking the cancer out of my mother’s open lungs like hornets from a nest, tossing the scraps to the side as if to a dog. Parched, I reached for the Thermos and regretted it, not prepared for the lukewarm, watered-down arak.
The house was miserably hot. The AC had cut out. I checked the thermostat, groggily jabbing the buttons, prying at the plastic cover until it creaked and snapped open. I replaced the batteries, expecting a hush of cool air, but nothing happened. My mind went to tampering – petty psychological warfare. I suspected they kept tabs on me, recording me from a distance. I felt it. They knew how much money I had, who I emailed and texted, where I went. That’s what they got off on. I went to the kitchen to see if the electricity was on in the rest of the house and didn’t see the green digital time on the stove. The fridge wasn’t humming, and when I plugged my phone in, the icon in the top corner showed that it wasn’t charging. So it was a simple power outage. The electricity would probably be out for hours.
Wadiyeh had texted me. I still didn’t want to see her. I opened all the windows and changed into a tank top and sweat shorts, deciding against pulling the curtains shut, even if it meant the satellite cameras could capture my body. I didn’t think administrative assistants in military uniform were staring at me on a monitor in real time, or an incel soldier was spitting in his hand in an empty control room, just that it was all uploaded onto a hard drive in the basement of some temperature-controlled government facility. An archive of digital videos of me cooking and putzing, going inside to refill my tea and get a snack, fingering my cellphone on the chair out back.
Sitting on the warm, sunlit couch cushions in plain view of the open window, I brought out my poppers and shook the vial to disturb the tiny white pellet within to strengthen the fumes. I uncapped it, held the bottle to my nostril, sniffed deeply and held my breath as I went slightly cross-eyed, braced against the pounding in my chest, strong as a baby’s kicks, my underwater heartbeat thumping in my ears. I lay back and closed my eyes. My temples and cunt throbbed and I felt a surge of sexual power. The blank, blotchy yellow screen of my eyelids gave way to a windowless office and a soldier, and as I pictured crouching before him, fishing out his soft bits and tearing into his scrotum with my teeth like into a tomato, I pleasured myself. I imagined feeling flooded in the hot blood and coiled noodles spilling from his groin, the ripped skin in my teeth, the smack of a bullet entering my forehead, blotting out my third eye, and I pleasured myself. Soldiers zipping my corpse in a body bag, ditching me in some overgrown valley, and I astonished myself, still hectically rubbing, not undeterred but fueled by the vile montage. Sometimes it got so bad, the images so hideous and demonic, a rushing cascade of intrusive thoughts I couldn’t stop or control, I had to pinch my clit hard to shut it up.
Usually, though, I could bear it, like I did now, slumped into the couch cushion with a leg on the coffee table. I shook the bottle and took another hit. I resisted the ghastliest of the images and toyed with the most seductively extreme, going past the line, but not so far past that I scared myself in a lingering way. My breathing became frenetic as I raised my hips off the couch and held myself there, tensed euphorically. Afterward, I fell back and immediately began coughing, heaving, honking, stomach-clenching coughs of disgust. I swore I’d throw out the poppers and be done with them, but they were just expensive enough that I didn’t want to be wasteful. And anyway, I’d tried that before.
The heat of the sunlight and the lack of AC felt suffocating. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I texted Wadiyeh and told her to meet me at Beit Aneeseh, then I sent Lucía the same message. I washed my face and held it close to the mirror, staring at the peach fuzz above my lips. I licked my fingers and smoothed my eyebrows, picked a fluff of lint from my belly button, wrapped my hair in a cinnamon turban, and dropped the poppers in my purse in case we ended up dancing.
At Beit Aneeseh, thorny bushes with sparse pink roses lined one side of the perimeter wall near the table where Wadiyeh sat in a rattan chair waving to me. There were tables full of smug, laugh-happy Europeans. By now I’d made acquaintances with a few regulars at the bar, worldly Arabs born there but who’d traveled or studied outside and spoke smooth, arrogant English. There was occasionally an air of a superiority complex in the subdued but condescending way they talked to waitstaff or in happenstance bar conversation with working-class shebab. But most were so well adjusted and sweet it made me uncomfortable to be around them, so I sought refuge with the garish, vacuous, ridiculous Wadiyeh, who carried herself like a Ramallah socialite.
Sitting alone sipping argileh, an apple ornamenting the glowing wafer of coal, her perfume smelled like makeup, or her makeup was perfumed, I wasn’t sure, but either way she was wearing too much of it. The smell mingled unpleasantly with the cloud of apple tobacco funneling out of her nostrils. I leaned over to kiss her cheeks and plopped down on the rattan chair beside her. There were days I liked how she smelled, powdery and synthetically floral, but tonight she smelled sweet and oily like a cadaver, like my father’s puffy hands and face smelled when I leaned over the glossy wood casket to kiss him. Some days she wore hijab, but mostly she didn’t. Tonight she didn’t. It depended on where we were going, if it matched a certain outfit or if it would make her fieldwork as an arts and culture journalist easier. I liked that about her, at least, her flippant stance on wearing hijab. More often than not she used a loose, stylized scarf over her hair as an excuse to wear tighter jeans and heels. I found this obnoxious and told her so. She clapped back that I dressed like I didn’t care.
On one of our first nights out together she said I looked like a man, criticizing my lack of eyeshadow or lipstick and how my few pieces of jewelry were too reserved. Then I showed her the Snapchat filter that masculinized her face. She raised the phone eye level and posed as the image on her screen thickened her brow and added a digital beard along her jawline, and she cackled when she saw herself on the phone screen – a stabbing, throaty laugh. I said she looked like a himbo but she didn’t hear or didn’t get the joke, swiveling her head to try to outmaneuver the lush black facial hair that clung digitally to her face.
Lucía would be meeting us soon. A couple tables over, three shebab were chain-smoking and drinking amber bottles of Taybeh, their black hair gelled and crispy. One of them had a reddish-brown face and shyness in his yellowed eyes. He probably labored outside, I thought, unlike his olive-skinned friends who looked like salesmen or bank clerks in chunky silver watches, pointy leather shoes and boxy untucked dress shirts with starched collars. Another sheb at their table smiled at us, raised his beer bottle and nodded, and I told Wadiyeh we should suggest joining tables. She hesitated, but I could tell they were her type and she wanted to flirt.
‘Come on,’ I said, opening Snapchat, ‘we can make them women.’
‘I don’t wanna embarrass them,’ Wadiyeh laughed.
‘They’re not Wahhābī,’ I said. ‘They can take a joke.’
‘I’m not even buzzed yet.’
She opened her phone camera to check her lipstick and swigged her beer, steeling herself. It was absurd – no matter how well the night went, how charming or persuasive the men, I knew Wadiyeh wouldn’t go home with any of them. She was too prudish to even give them her number.
I nodded in their direction. ‘Bidkum tokudu ma’ana?’
They lifted their beers and cigarette packs and dragged their table over so it touched ours. Wadiyeh pointed at each of their chests to get their names, reducing the grown men to giggling schoolboys waiting their turn. She talked too much like always, introducing me as ‘sahebti Americaniyeh’. I would have rolled my eyes, but I didn’t want to undermine her. Now that they were closer, I saw that the red-faced one, Majid, wore a wedding ring. He was handsome and had full lips and a part in his gelled hair.
Years of coming to Palestine had taught me that most villages had an unofficial troubadour, a young man everyone would nominate, if they could, to audition for Arab Idol to become the next Mohammed Assaf. Majid’s friends did this now, cajoling him to impress us with his gift. The red deepened through the brown as he smiled nervously and declined. But when Wadiyeh rested her hand on his forearm and begged in a moany, childish tone, ‘Bidna nismaa sotak al-hilo,’ he cleared his throat and looked at the other tables as if to gauge how quiet or loud he should be. His friends stared at him with the anticipation of watching their favorite striker line up to take a penalty shot. He tilted his chin and sang a sad song, stretching the vowels with yearning vibrato. His voice was cottony and achingly gentle. He closed his eyes through some of it, then opened them and gazed absently at the sky. He held eye contact with me for a few seconds before looking around at the others. I wondered if he made his wife wet by singing to the TV with a cigarette dangling from his fleshy lower lip, if he whispered a song after coming another kid into her on a Wednesday, stuffed zucchini jostling around their bellies like the soggy clothes in the dryer.
After a round of fawning applause that included several of the surrounding tables, we settled back into conversation and a few minutes later, Wadiyeh opened Snapchat, flipped the camera and pointed it at me, showing the shebab my glitchy beard and thick caricaturesque eyebrows. They burst into guffaws, spurting smoke, the scent of apple and beer in the cool air. I thought I looked hot, honestly, if too metrosexual. We showed them what they’d look like as women, eyelashes like centipede legs. They ducked out of the frame, and Wadiyeh chased them with the front-facing camera, capturing their happy female faces, computerized hair draping over blushing cheekbones, lips full and red. I was irritated with her for monopolizing the male sheb-himbos’ attention, and irritated with Majid for falling for it.
I ordered olives for the table. They came in a white saucer, swimming in brine, slippery and bruise-purple. I hogged the plate and ate most of them, dropping the pits into Wadiyeh’s empty beer bottle. I picked up one of Majid’s olive pits that he’d left sitting on the table next to his last beer and popped it in my mouth, turning it on my tongue like a Werther’s.
Lucía arrived, Lucía the lesbian’s lesbian in torn jeans and a slouchy yellow tank top, a single skinny dreadlock on one side of her caramel-colored hair. She made a show of kissing everyone three times, even the shebab she’d just met, from cheek to cheek to cheek. A soft-spoken waiter came over and she ordered a Riesling and a fresh argileh for the table. I was glad because now we would all pass the nozzle around and share each other’s spit. Wadiyeh and the shebab flirtatiously debated what flavor of tobacco to order, but they settled on tufahtayn, the usual.
I slightly resented Lucía’s ease with new people. She lounged back in her chair and spoke rapidly to one of the men and was nodding and laughing with him in under a minute. She even spoke Arabic more fluently than me, the bitch. I could picture her living her whole life in Palestine, where I was sure that even if I could, I probably wouldn’t. I was here on a renewable three-month tourist visa, her work visa extended a year at a time. Still, I wished she’d break up with her girlfriend in Spain so I could start sleeping with her. Maybe I’d sleep with her anyway.
Lucía waved over a friend she recognized from across the bar, a drunk, pudgy Egyptian in a frumpy leather jacket. As he made his way to us, zigzagging widely around tables, she told us that they’d been in Tahrir Square together during the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring. She stood to greet him but he staggered past her and leaned over the table, jostling it and spilling the olive brine as he declared, in heavily accented English and without so much as a hello, ‘We Egyptians are more Palestinian than you Palestinians. You can drink to forget but I can’t.’
Wadiyeh sucked in air. No one spoke.
‘Maalek, ya zalameh?’ one of the sheb finally shouted, What’s wrong with you?, as Majid grabbed his beer bottle menacingly. Lucía was panicking. I could see it in her eyes. She grabbed her drunk friend by his leather jacket and pulled him away as he smirked and muttered with wet lips.
Wadiyeh and I glanced at each other. She looked grim. I tried thinking of something to say to lighten the mood, anything to steer us away from the possibility of talking politics. I almost asked Majid for another song. Then the waiter came over and set Lucía’s wine glass in front of her empty chair, and a minute later returned with the apple argileh, handing me the nozzle. He flipped the blazing coal with silver tongs and said, ‘Fadhul.’
Wadiyeh was the only one who thanked him.
I hesitated, then held the plastic to my lips and inhaled, pulling in sweet vapor. The water in the base of the argileh burbled obscenely against the silence.
Photograph by Maen Hammad, from Landing, Palestine, 2019
