I started digging my way to Palestine later than most, but I made good time. I had very little to carry.
A few things had set me back, but the hardest part was finding a place to start. Once I was ready, I waited for my mother to leave for work one morning, and then I got moving. The backyard of our house on the outskirts of Sydney had been cemented over in the 1980s. I tried getting through the foundation with a jackhammer, but I was only two meters deep before a council worker showed up, saying a complaint had been made that I was disturbing the neighbourhood.
“That’s all right, I won’t be here long,” I told him.
“I’m going to Palestine.”
“Oh, I heard about that trend,” he said, peering over my shoulder to eye the hole in the backyard.
“Well, it’s too loud for these streets. You’ll have to do it someplace else.”
“Please, I’m in a hurry,” I said.
“Why? Something I don’t know about Palestine? Does it disappear in the summer like the polar ice caps?”
“Yeah,” I tried.
The council worker gave a sympathetic shrug. I packed up and rushed to my grandmother’s house with a shovel.
Since my grandparents had died, another half-Palestinian, half–North African family had moved into their old house – only this family’s other half was from Fez, not Alexandria. Someone’s car was in the driveway, so I hopped the fence and sped around the back of the shed, where I could dig unnoticed. One meter down, I hit solid stone. I cleared off the soil to gauge how big the obstruction was and whether I could haul it out – and then I began to see the stone was engraved.
I flattened myself to the ground and hung my head down into the hole to make out the inscription in the shadows:
To God we belong and to Him we return.
In loving memory of Munira Abdullah. 1939–2015.
Born in Jerusalem, Palestine.
The black marble shone with gilded engravings. It was a headstone. I lay there on my stomach in the dirt and re-read my grandmother’s name. There was no digging it out. There was no circumvention. I knew then that if I tried another spot in this garden, I’d hit her headstone again. I knew it would be all under this house – and it went all the way down.
“Why are you crying?” came a child’s voice from behind me.
I flipped over and lay flat on my back. Through the blur of tears, I recognised the boy – Mustafa, the youngest of the family that lives in the house now. I made out his Moroccan soccer jersey, so baggy it reached midway down his pants. He had his little head cocked to one side while I dried my face on my sleeve.
Half-delirious, I said, “I’m going to Palestine.”
“Haya’s gone already,” he told me, unfazed.
“Your sister?”
He said, “Come, look,” and headed inside.
I stumbled after him past the living room, where his mother stared blankly at an Arab cooking show playing on mute and his father sat by an open window, holding an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
“Do they know she’s gone? Do they know where she’s going?” I whispered as we slipped down the hall.
“They don’t think about that place,” he said – and then we were in his sister’s room.
I knew Haya from a distance. We had gone to the same university; I was in nursing, she was in arts/law. On the few occasions my mother had let me join a cross-city march for Palestine, it had been Haya at the lead, her face splashed across social media, her name co-signing public statements.
Her bedroom looked as expected. She had Palestinian and anti-Zionist posters layered like wallpaper from floor to ceiling, and hole-punched dinars hanging on gold necklace chains off her bedposts, and three differently coloured keffiyehs tossed over a hat stand, and postcards and envelopes with Palestinian stamps and addresses littering her desk, and all the literature – everything people meant when they said Palestinian Literature – stacked on mounted bookshelves and in piles on the floor.
I remembered being in the audience of a panel she was on at a writers’ festival featuring Palestinian essayists, and when the chair asked her how she always managed such eloquence and civility in debate, she stuttered when she took the mic. I saw her trawl for an appropriate response.
At first, she spoke in a measured way:
“Oh… have I been civil? I mean, have I given the impression I see this as a civil debate? Or that… this question — which is the question of my life — is even up for debate?”
Then she grew possessed by stillness, the way Arabs do when their emotions break through on a stage. She seized the crowd up in her intensity as she continued:
“I… I don’t feel civil. My grief doesn’t feel eloquent or dignified. And I am in grief. And I can’t sleep. And I know it will be hell for me any time I want to see my family in Palestine – until the day I die – and there is no civil feeling in my heart about that. I just want to go home to the place I was born. Can you understand how sick I feel from wanting to be back on that land? Wrath is the only response to an injustice God hates. Wrath is my birthright. And I won’t – I won’t – have another single one of my rights denied in this life.”
On this, she finished. Her body shut in on itself. The audience applauded her; I could see she felt nauseated. I remembered being afraid of all her love and her anger.
That was years before. In her bedroom, Mustafa grabbed hold of the underside of her bedframe. Towing on it with his bodyweight, he dragged the bed from the wall. Underneath it – instead of carpet – was a huge, unending hole in the earth.
“She dug that?” I was in awe.
Mustafa nodded.
“How long…?”
“Pretty quick,” Mustafa said. He crouched on the edge and peered down, then turned to me. “She said it was easy because she knew where she was going. Have you been?”
I shook my head.
“Me neither. Anyway, you can use her tunnel. She wouldn’t mind,” he said sweetly.
“Why didn’t you go with her?”
Mustafa stood and toed the carpet with his Nike socks. “I’m scared. From what I see on the news.”
There wasn’t much to say to that. I climbed over the edge and lowered myself down.
“Is that all you’re taking?” Mustafa called as an afterthought.
Other than a compass, I had my father’s wristwatch, my grandfather’s leather jacket, my mother’s shovel, and — on a yellowed piece of paper in a plastic sleeve – a drawing of the Jerusalem night sky my grandmother had made when she was a child.
“This is all I brought,” I hollered back, realizing I was mortifyingly ill-equipped.
Mustafa told me to wait for a moment, zipped off, then ran back to drop me a flashlight. With a final wave, he dragged the bedframe back into place, and I was sealed in the earthen dark.
When word spread that Palestinians Down Under were digging their way to Jerusalem, the logistics baffled non-believers. But it wasn’t the first time Muslims had travelled to Palestine at a supra-temporal rate. The Prophet only took one night. Not being anywhere near prophethood myself, I was more realistic. I expected to arrive by the end of the month.
Gradually, the tunnel’s gradient flattened out. I followed Haya’s path and kept steady re-excavation of the mounds she left in her wake. With engineering shrewdness, I turned my hijab into a head strap for Mustafa’s flashlight so I could free up my hands. There were no strange men to see my hair down there. The only thought in my mind was: go fast.
Precedent was everything. For sustenance, I relied on the same Hand that had delivered out-of-season fruits to a monastery for Mary of Nazareth. When Haya’s tunnel veered up toward the crust, tubers and root vegetables hung from a thin ceiling of soil, and I could tug them down, buff them with my leather jacket, and eat. Through the holes Haya and I left – where the vegetables had been – shone increasingly foreign rays of sun, or unfamiliar murmurs of night. Water trickled through the tunnel walls in places. I knew the more filtered the water tasted, the deeper I was in the earth.
Closer to the surface, I could use my compass to determine the direction of prayer. Further down, the arrow would spin – first slowly and uncertainly, and then wildly – and in those horrible stretches, I had the sense that I was slipping from heaven downward in a spiral so intense it was shearing the skin from my flesh. Then I was scared. Behind and before me stretched a blackness I could not comprehend. The weight of an obscure haunting pressed on my back all the way to Palestine. If I was sweating, panting, and chasing after Haya, who was to say that there wasn’t some blind, writhing creature salivating hot on my trail? Or that if I closed my eyes, my body wouldn’t think I was buried and instinctively die instead of just falling asleep?
All week, I kept moving… moving. Only my father’s wristwatch kept me oriented to time. Go fast.
On the seventh day, I was shoveling like mad. My body burned. Haya can’t be much further, I told myself, so I could flail the shovel farther and take longer strides. The dirt got in my mouth and ears. The dirt was my face. I had reached a stage where being alone was unbearable, and being underground was unbearable – and those feelings combined to make me suddenly too claustrophobic to breathe. I collapsed and was sure I would die.
I stared up at the brown Underneath. Onto the roof over my body, the flashlight projected a halo of desperation, and I asked myself: What vision am I moving towards? How will it recognize me? Can I change my life? And if I’m too estranged? I lay there in the dark until my breathing quieted down.
I became aware of a scratching sound a few meters northwest. I shot up and listened. My heart was exploding. Then, like my life depended on it – and it did – I scooped up my scant belongings and sprinted toward the sound of digging. My headlamp caught glimpse first of the back of her calves and then, within a few frenzied steps, her whole being, wide-eyed and pressed up against the dirt wall behind her. Screaming, she dropped her shovel and whipped out a Swiss Army knife.
“Haya, Haya, wait!” I shouted over her. I let my shovel clatter to the ground and held my hands out in truce and self-defense. “It’s just me, it’s Nouran!”
She stopped short in incomprehension, then went limp with disbelief.
“Nouran from the women’s soccer team at uni?”
Of all the associations to make, that one seemed the most random, but nothing about our situation was in the norm. I nodded and lowered my arms.
“I started a dig in my grandmother’s backyard,” I explained. “Couldn’t get through.”
“She’s dead,” Haya pointed out. “Allah yerhamha.”
“I didn’t know it worked like that. Your brother said I could use your dig instead.”
“Right,” she accepted, looking neither pleased nor displeased. Exhaustion overcame her. She put the knife away. “Sorry. For a second, I thought you were… I don’t know.”
“An animal?”
“The IDF.”
She laughed at herself, miserable. She lifted the base of her shirt from her grazed and shining abdomen to dry her eyes, leaving streaks of mud across her face – which was gaunter than I remembered, but no less full of anger.
Then the long night of our isolation was over.
We slumped against opposite walls of the tunnel and rested our elbows on bent-up knees. For a while, we just stared at each other. We panted and frowned under the interrogation of two makeshift headlamps. Mirrored on our faces was the dirt-caked grit of coal miners unused to human warmth.
At last, Haya said, “I’m going to sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep.”
“Me neither,” I said.
We arranged ourselves to lie one after the other, parallel with the tunnel – my head closest to the northwest, and hers close to my feet. That she let me lie in front of her came as a relief; the terrible sense of being hounded by a creature coming in leaps and bounds from behind wouldn’t leave me.
“We won’t rest long. I just want to get there,” Haya said as I closed my eyes. Her long breath was bleak. “Can you believe this is the easiest way?”
We slept like the people of the cave; maybe years passed. When we awoke, Haya took out from her backpack radishes and onions she had collected along the way. She split them with her knife and passed halves to me. Still rusty, we ate in silence – and in silence, we continued on our way.
The first few days, Haya piped up frequently.
“Why do you always check your compass?” she asked once while we were in the middle of our first dig session of the day. She stuck her shovel in the ground and propped her forearms on the handle, breathing hard as she faced me.
“Just to double-check.”
“I know where we’re going,” she said, a tad indignant. “We don’t need that. You can put it away.”
Pushing my luck, I said, “We’re a few degrees off track.”
“That’s because I’m not heading there as the crow flies. I’m planning to join tunnels with some other Palestinian folks under the Maldives.”
“How do you know where their tunnels are?”
She tapped her forehead with two fingers. “We’re in communication.”
I had no idea what that meant. Outside my own family, I was not in communication with any Palestinians. Even among my own family’s Palestinians, I knew close to nil. It wasn’t something my grandparents had wanted to pass down — or perhaps they hadn’t been able to bear dredging it up. Or perhaps they’d convinced themselves it was uninteresting. By the time I’d grown conscious enough to wonder about the histories that had led to my life, they were dead.
To Haya, I said, “Oh, right,” and kept digging. I had my own pride to protect.
Weeks passed. All we did was dig, eat, pray, sleep, and dig. Haya spoke to me less and less, maybe because I never initiated conversation. I was still nervous around her – more now than in the past. Laboring side by side made me more aware of the imbalance in our claims to Palestinian indignity. If we grew close, I thought, she would see how little I knew.
In looks, also, we couldn’t have been more unalike. It was difficult to make each other out except under direct torchlight, so I had to take inventory of her in stolen throws of my beam in the dark. My eyes were browner, she was more tanned, her curls looser than my Egyptian coils, and I had a squarer frame.
She never commented on it outright, but once, while we were resting, she said, unexpectedly, “I never met two Palestinian Australians who look like they’re from the same country.”
I laughed, because it was true. Then I didn’t know what was true about it. What did it mean, from the same country? Especially for us, who weren’t from one place.
She heard me thinking and shrugged. “Or, whatever – same ethnicity.” Sometimes, I felt her study me with an aggravated feeling.
All she spoke about in those weeks was the people we would meet under the Maldives – always with a tone like I wouldn’t believe how incredible these “real Palestinian” men and women were, from all around the world.
Well, we reached the Maldives and there was nothing. Every hour that passed without the wall of earth ahead collapsing into an adjoining tunnel and delivering us into the arms and smiles of our fellow wayward siblings, Haya’s mood stiffened. She started saying maybe they’d overshot us because we were going too slow — so we’d have to speed up if we even wanted our paths to intersect.
What we gained in speed over the following days, we sacrificed in the width of our dig. We began to bump up against each other while we worked. Everything was mixed: our grunts, our sweat. Even with my grandfather’s jacket tied around my waist and Haya’s keffiyeh stuffed in her bag, we grew agitated under the close press of each other’s body heat.
I could dig faster and longer without rest. Sometimes, when Haya strained too hard to match me and eventually doubled over and lagged for a few steps, I caught her watching me with what I thought was hatred.
A month in, we were butting shoulders. She shoved me off abruptly.
“Can I get some space?”
I gestured to the shoebox we were in. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Tightly, she said, “I don’t want any distractions. I just want to get to Palestine.”
“What distraction?” The sportswoman in me reared up against attack.
Haya looked restless. Suddenly she turned and started pounding the wall of soil to her right, trying to break through.
“We should have met the others by now!” she said, her voice rising. She spun and began banging against the wall on my side. “They should be right behind here! Are we too low?” She started slamming the roof, making it rain pebbles and soil.
Frightened, I grabbed her arms to hold her back, and she threw me off, shouting:
“What did I just say? Back off!
If you weren’t here, maybe I would’ve spent more time concentrating on being in the right place at the right time – to meet up with the people I actually asked to join me.
Why are you even here? Why are you so rude? Why don’t you ever say anything?
Turn around, if you want! It’s not too late for you to go back the way you came!”
