…close your eyes

Warning: the last half of this blog contains no graphic images save ones captured by my words. A bloody holiday has gone by, and I mean no joke in my title. If you’d rather not read of this, stop when you see Eid al-Adha.

I woke up to the goose grumbling yesterday morning and the rooster’s competitive call, though I had wanted to catch up on some sleep. And I was a bit peeved so I closed my eyes and allowed myself to wander into daydreams of roasted goose and rooster cordon bleu. I decided, though, as I parted the covers and embraced a blast of crisp, cold air, that I should not be so upset. Perhaps the fowl aren’t nuisances, I think, but alarm clocks, and just have annoyance wrapped into their function. It was time to get up anyway.

This perspective change settled my fury enough for me to rise and stumble into my kitchen, hungrier for meat than is usual for that time of day. And as I slipped on my slippers, I realized there is much in my life I’ve changed perspective on. Many things surround me whose functions have been…redefined, for my slippers aren’t slippers at all, really. I didn’t bring real slippers with me, but my cement floors are vacuums of heat, so, my L.L.Bean boat shoes with my L.L.Bean socks have become, together, my L.L.Bean slippers. If I close my eyes, they feel about the same.

I go to put on a sweatshirt, but approach no dresser. Instead discarded cardboard boxes for tea, fruit and some other Israeli product sit on the floor, drawers for clothes. One has my shirts, another pants and snuggies, and still another sweaters and flannels.

After I make my coffee (this is real, though Arab, not filter) I head back to my room to climb back into bed for a morning in Middle Earth. I am greeted by hanging vines from window to window that display laundry instead of leaves and flowers, whose scent is soapy, sometimes musty. It makes my thin-walled rooms strangely cavernous when the cold creeps in undeterred, like the heart of Misty Mountains whence the Ring was found (which makes me Gollum, wide-eyed, riddling, fingering my preciousss. Sounds about right.).

Next to my head an upturned drawer becomes a long bedside shelf. Here my coffee perches, as do my collection of books. I don’t actually want this shelf here, because it messes with the spatial arrangement in my near-empty room, but with one outlet five feet off the floor by the exit, it is a matter of practicality: this shelf also supports charging cell phones and computers and razors.

And though I have surround sound (which is a stretch for the noise of these wild children), I have no television or internet, and entertainment is defined by the words of authors. But I think I’d rather have it this way. Coffeeshops with wifi are my transitory offices for e-mail, Skype and an occasional catch-up on some American TV.

When I find a good stopping point in my book, encouraged by a break in text or a call from nature, I get up and use the facilities. Often the water is short, and sputters when I summon her. It’s a good thing I have an Arabic toilet to use when flushing is denied me. Oh, my porcelain pit that opens to sewage, the child of holes and thrones, that proves useful, though pungent. This isn’t so much a change in function as a change within that motivates me to use it.

All of these things can make one feel “not-at-home,” and for me, the feeling of home is important. So I have been purchasing things that make life slightly homier: cooking utensils and even a pan, a knife for cutting and a bowl for rice. I have a couch-ish thing to sit on and a Palestinian flag serves as a light-shade.  And since it was the eve of Eid al-Adha, one of two important Muslim holidays, I had someone over for dinner and we ate on my small cardboard table with plastic-bag cover.

High sun on Eid al-Adha

Eid al-Adha is the holiday where the Muslims remember their father Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his son when God asked him to. In their version of this shared story, the knife remains powerless to cut Ishmael’s neck, and a replacement ram was provided. The Muslim world celebrates this provision (for by it they live) by similarly sacrificing a ram in remembrance, and even in atonement. I have spoken with some of my English-speaking friends who say this replacement sacrifice can erase the owner and his family’s bad deeds. What it also means is that there is a dramatic swell in business at the slaughterhouses and butcher shops. Of this, I went to see.

I connected with a friend of mine at seven in the morning after an earlier-than-usual mosque service. We went and retrieved his family’s sacrifice, a milk-chocolatey ram with short, curling horns, and milky streaks. An apple was brought to encourage the ram’s cooperation, but he didn’t bite; he sensed danger.

We got him to the butcher shop and here the air was soused with the smell of dam (blood). My heart twinged at the thought that our ram could smell it too, but no one seemed to be similarly concerned. We caught the first wave of slaughters, standing in that shop and I held the rams head between my thighs to block out as much sensory input as I could.  Again we tried to get him to eat the apple, but it was no surprise when he turned it down. Soon we relocated him to the pen full of those on death row, and let him forget what he had seen and smelt. Many of the sheep seemed to have that bland look about them as they walked in circles sniffing one another like dogs. Perhaps I was seeing more than was real, that my open eyes deceived me, but our ram behaved unlike the others. Perhaps he had seen too much, for he had a calm not of naivety, but of peril, and he was driving himself slowly as far away from the door that led to the blade as he could.

Inevitably, his quest was fruitless, but I will speak of the process in general, not locating the affliction onto our ram, though I watched as he was led through every step.

A sheep is dragged, bleating and resisting, onto the bloody tile where carcasses lay, twitch and kick. I have recognized only two expressions in the empty eyes of these simpler animals thus far: calm and fear, but as he finds himself on his back, sopping up the blood of his kin, his head raised and knife at his neck, I see for one brief moment something deeply pitiable. He looks at me in absolute terror, though this is not a terror of what might be, but what is to come. He has a knowing terror that breaches the limits of his reason, and here, just before the butcher swipes, the sheep’s eyes become piercingly sharp, dark, like winternight, and then in a blink, they fade into a grey, empty dusk.

I couldn’t tell where life ended and death began; here there is a moment of passing, where some try in ignorance to get back on their feet and escape, only to collapse into gruesome knowledge.

The ones who cry out are the hardest to see go, but each one’s throat is gaped open, their breath immediately rasped and barbed, and their dam joins the sea around us. Perhaps the most graphic part of the process occurs as the twitching and flopping begins, which can continue for what seems like far too long. Thunderous thuds echo as hinged heads hit the floor and the spatter of bloodrain follows as legs involuntarily kick. As I tried to hide our ram from this sight an hour before, I was hit with this fleshy precipitation. The whole place reeked, as deep red rivers found drains and wide-eyes and slacked jaws stared at me in horror from mounds of matted wool. In movies people are beheaded with such grace, if I may use that word so irreverently, and William Wallace’s lover greets this kind of death with a calm sadness. I wonder how terrible it really was to have lived under the shadow of the guillotine.

A calm descends, though, as the sacrifices finally still. Some men congratulate each other and seal the moment with some coffee. Today everyone wears their best clothes, and often their brand new ones, as is tradition to receive for Eid, and it proves to be a strange sight: bloodfloor under the feet of suits and ties and children watching the grisly affair. They wait for the skinning, cleaning and partitioning now, half for their family, half for the poor, and the butchers do this with skill and ease. Some pull a carcass aside and begin, while some open a whole in the leg and pump air between organ and skin, bloating the goat. And as the knife makes slits and the balloon deflates, he lays there awkwardly obese, sagging and limp.

I saw enough; I needed to go home and throw my clothes in the washing machine. I said farewell and blessed my friends, then averted my eyes from what I came to see, and left with a fuller meaning of what a sacrifice really is weighing on my mind, and the images behind the lids of my closed eyes.

...eat with your fingers

Among the Himony’s, and even elsewhere in al Khalil, I am somewhat of a celebrity. This is, of course, only because I am a foreigner (and not because I am a desperately humorous, relationally warm cultural changeling. Who? Me? Go on…). But, really. What this means is that I am always in the limelight, and my dear sirs and misses, that is quite stressful. Under the spot I am expected to talk, to understand, to eat, drink and be merry (for tomorrow we die), and to always wear my sixteen-dollar smile. But let’s be honest, sometimes I want to pout, mope and be gloomy (for tomorrow we wake up to the same damn goose, honking it’s beak-horn inches outside my window).

The party crowd

But there was a week I disappeared, though I cannot say I was pleased about it.

See, the seasons have changed and I find myself even cold sometimes. Yes, cold. The drama of it all gave me the flu, actually. Shukran, my dear Mother Nature, for lovely days of headaches, muscle pain and busy, exhausting dreams that stitched together ugly nights. Good thing I had Middle Earth, with her tales of dragons and great, big spiders and great, small hobbits, to have spent my many dreary hours in (while also dreaming of eating the goose that barked my sleep into exhaustion).

But finally the cold sweats passed, and now my skull is no longer host to a small war. I can look at this computer screen and type without my eyes turning into subwoofers. Yaaeeey…

Blurry but enthusiastic. Old and young dancing.

Fall brings more than influenza, though. It brings earwigs! Uhhh…And a wedding! Much betterrr… This wedding was quaint and not as big as the first one I went to. Something about that thing was epic; this was more modest. The dancing was fun, the crowd smaller, the event shorter. We ate our small meal at the end of the ruckus and let the next day happen.

I haven’t yet mentioned that the young man who got married is my Arab brother, Ibrahim. So this time I got to be a part of the three-day affair; I got to help. Day two came and I rose early to join my family in the preparations for the big lunch they were to provide. The large hall we were in, owned by the Himony family and used for events like these, needed a cleaning. The night before hundreds of men had sat in chairs drinking coffee, tamir (sweet date juice) and eating sweets after congratulating the groom and his family. Spilt liquids, candy-wrappers and cigarette butts carpeted the concrete. So we flooded, scrubbed and squeegee’d it, leaving it shiny and ready for tables and chairs, chairs, chairs.

Me dancing with a young Himony

But we finished early and had some time to sit and rest, though the kitchen crew was working hard to prepare the food (as they were doing when we arrived this morning). I took to cutting pita bread into fourths and then preparing plastic bowls for the hoards of men that began to arrive after morning prayers, around noon.

Here is the process from pot to plate: Oily, salty, unbearably tasty mass-roasted almonds get sprinkled into plastic bowls. These bowls get filled with rice from a pot the size of a small tub and flipped onto a plate. The bowl is removed and a beautiful almond-capped rice-mountain stands, awaiting a hunk of lamb meat. When they are married (till teeth do them part) they head to ever-flipping tables and chairs to be et by friends and family. When satisfied and gone, plates return to the kitchen, get cleared, washed and reused. After all, we are feeding upwards of two thousand people (did I forget to mention that? Well it’s true. 2000. Two-thousand). Did I also forget to mention that everything is done with fingers?

Preparing the meal

 UnSANitaryyy! (That’s meant to be sung)

I spent the morning in the kitchen jumping between tasks: putting almonds into bowls or being the rice man (so fun) or passing the rice man empty bowls. And all was done with really greasy hands.

After the men ate the women came, around two. There are fewer of them and its all a bit less-rushed. We were able to prep many of the plates before hand, and barely needed to prepare any more after that. Then I moved on to do the dishes. For like, six centuries.

Meanwhile, some ladies remained chatting in the dining room, though the men had long-since disappeared. There is a tradition here where the groom’s close friends take him home, strip him down to his skivvies, wash him and give him a good shave (earlier they partook in the tradition of feeding him with their fingers. Remember, lamb and rice. It was messy, but smiley). I would have enjoyed experiencing the groom-grooming, but there are many things that require better Arabic to anticipate, so I missed it while in the kitchen. I was present, however, for the rest of the evening, albeit dirty and splattered. A great host of Himony men went to the family of the bride’s neighborhood, and once again sat down and drank shockingly sweet coffee and, from what I can gather, exchanged blessings. Then the bride, Raghada, got into the car with Ibrahim and away we went, a honking, screeching parade, until we made it to a wedding hall.

This hall hosted the women who, with dresses and make-up I only hear tales about, watch each other dance and eat cake and sit and gab. Outside the hall, impromptu music would spring up, hearts warm with enthusiasm, and a circle would emerge in the center of a crowd. Dancing would spark, as would some sneaky fireworks, and Himony men would be hoisted onto shoulders and celebrated. In between these jolts of joviality we stood around, chatted, waited, or ran into the small store to buy a snack. Mostly, though, cigarettes were smoked.

I admit, I didn’t have the stamina to keep going, though. After leaving the shelter of the kitchen I had, once again, garnered altogether too much attention, and my brain was too tired to keep translating. I had been on my feet since that morning, about 10 hours earlier, and hadn’t had a chance to freshen up. Plus the twerps, as I affectionately call the boys who find it their duty to be parasites around me, were being extra twerpy (or maybe my fuse was just a bit shorter). Either way, I found someone to drive me home, and I was never happier to see it.

I was blessed to have been a part of the wedding-machine, to work with my hands, to do something half-way rigorous, and to be out of the limelight a bit more than usual (and not because of my health deciding to run off and dance with Hades for a week). But it is inescapable (the limelight, that is). I wasn’t unhappy, though, to have been left behind at lunch with the women. I poked my head out of the kitchen and was beckoned forward for hearty, breasty chuckles about my relation to the family. These women, with their splintered faces, smiled matronly at me while in the peripheral I saw the younger ones lean in to whisper to each other and giggle. I’m sure they were mentioning my blonde hair and great, Caucasian features. Well, probably not, but I was offered a Khalili wife again, and I thanked the women and said Insha’allah, and then remarked about how expensive weddings were, with shock in my eyes.

But the truth is I don’t want a Khalili wedding. Not now. Sometimes I’d rather just be in the kitchen with oily hands than out there in the limelight. The wonder of being a foreigner has its stresses.