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Badia’s Magic Water

by Maya Abu-Alhayyat, translated by Yasmine Seale

 

Badia walks into Ramallah Hospital like she owns the place, unhurried, greeting everyone and taking in their greetings. Stories fly to meet her in a brew of caution, curiosity, and fear. From Samira the receptionist (recently married, keen to please) she wants to know if the tranquillisers had their effect on her husband, who makes love to her like a bull. To Said the errand boy she promises a special treatment for his spine, which keeps him up at night. Now handsome young doctor Sami, whom the nurses like to stop and ask ridiculous questions about the weather and incurable diseases, is running towards her, reverently kissing her hand in the way of old movies. “God keep you from harm,” she says with a laugh and asks about his mother, Sitt Fikriyya, who devoted her life to his becoming a doctor.

On Badia walks, swinging the orange carrier bag whose contents no one dares to ask about. The soft headscarf slips from her loose red bun as she totters down to the basement, fighting back a cheeky smile at the memory of the young doctor’s kiss and repeating to herself, “Keep you from harm.” She opens the door of the autopsy room with her blue-beaded key and swaps her coat for a white gown. Her mobile rings. It’s Umm Salama, calling to say she has sent her a girl with psoriasis from Haifa. She had spotted her with her mother at the Khalaf perfume shop, told her that Badia would be able to cure her with her magic water, and directed her to where Badia worked. Badia is annoyed with Umm Salama (she tells this story to everyone) and worries that her workplace at Ramallah Hospital will turn into a shrine or, God forbid, a clinic. She was wrong to have told her about the water, and how it cleared her own hands of the eczema that had plagued her since Osama’s death. Not to mention the woman who once snuck into the autopsy room to steal some of the magic water that had spilled off a girl’s corpse, to use it for some spell or ritual, who, when Badia tried to remove her, had bent down to where the water pooled on the ground and tried to lick it up.

Samah, the nurse who makes the journey from Tammun every day, takes in the day’s death schedule. The first corpse is a woman from al-Bireh, near eighty. The second is a woman in her fifties who has to be prepared for transportation to Nablus. The third is a young woman of twenty who has spent three days in the morgue. A long day awaits, but Badia does not begin work before brewing a glass of tea with her special herbs and smoking a cigarette.

Badia does not like to wash younger women, the mothers least of all. She prefers the elderly, whose corpses everyone is in a hurry to get rid of and few will miss. Their daughters and the wives of their sons slip her a bit of money. It helps them shed their sense of helplessness in the face of the decline and inevitable death of an old mother, especially when the bedsores appear, pinking the bodies swollen from their long, motionless sleep and which, to the sons and daughters busy with their own lives, look like festering wounds. She will deal with the bodies of the two older women first, then work her way round to the young one.

Samah regards Badia with admiration and a little awe. She fascinates her friends with her strange stories. Her mother had warned her not to get too close to her in case it spoiled her chances of marriage. Did she want to stay single forever? The magic waters of the dead can do a lot. But in Badia’s presence, Samah forgets this talk and goes on telling her about the road clogged with checkpoints, a preamble to the question she wants to put to her.

A month before, Badia had noticed a change in Samah, sensed she had a secret she could not tell anyone, not even her, Badia, to whom everyone opens their heart. Samah, as has become her habit, asks to leave work for an hour midway through her shift, a request she has made for the past month, ever since her return from a long holiday she claimed to have spent in her family’s village home. If a person does not want to tell, Badia thinks, she will not ask.

Badia has finished with the first body: an easy task, everything prepared ahead of time and supervised by the wives of the dead woman’s two sons. They stand, the wives, outside the autopsy room as Badia pours water on the plump body, reciting prayers. Nothing crueller than a mother without daughters, she thinks. A mother without daughters has no one to mourn her. One of the women had tucked fifty dollars into her palm before she began, and this makes her work with all her heart.

She places a clean towel between the legs, then pulls the right side of the body towards her and cleans it, then the left. Then comes the full ablution, and the wrapping of the head, then the whole body, in clean white cloth. She does not make the same effort with the second woman, who will likely be given a fresh shroud in Nablus by the women of her family.

Badia takes a break to smoke a cigarette, its taste unlike the one she smoked this morning. It is a waiting cigarette, smoked in the hope that Samah will come back. But Samah takes her time, and Badia is out of excuses to keep her from starting on the third corpse. Young bodies fill her with dread, not that she has seen many in her time at the hospital. Most of her young clients are girls, killed in stories of love and suspicion. Only two died of natural causes. The rest of the day, she knows, will be shadowed with gloom.

The workers place the body on a large slab in the middle of the room, covered with a blue hospital sheet. Three days in a fridge are enough to harden the softest body on earth. Badia is suddenly aware of a line of light from the window parting the darkness. The dust hanging in the room’s air becomes visible. The voices of street vendors, mixed with the sounds of children on their lunch break at the nearby Qaddoura Camp girl school, filter down to the hospital basement. Badia lifts the sheet off the girl’s face, revealing thick, wavy red hair which snakes down half her body.

The breasts hanging limply to the sides stop Badia, who understands at once that a baby’s mouth has clamped itself around these teats: traces of redness and inflammation are still visible. The skin around the uterus and navel show that she has given birth not long before. Badia touches the skin and steps back. How could a body refrigerated for three days still be so warm and soft?

She rushes to the girl’s file and reads. Twenty-nine years old, nurse, traces of poison in the blood. They killed her: the thought leaps to Badia’s mind. They killed her. She clutches at her heart for a moment. She remembers it all as if it had just happened. Seventeen when she met Osama, who trotted past their house in al-Bireh on a white horse, clad in black. She loved him straight away, and began to wait for him to leave the nearby mosque after evening prayer. The longer she waited for him to pass, the more she loved him, until the day she met him in a clothes shop in the Ramallah souq.

Only in that period did she come to understand the difference between Ramallah and al-Bireh. The overlapping cities were divided by an imaginary line, existing nowhere but in the heads of their residents, but which became clear to her when Ramallah was chosen as their meeting place, far from the eyes of her mother’s large family in al-Bireh.

This was in the days of the First Intifada. They got engaged, entered university together, stole moments in rented cars on the roads between the city centre and the university in Birzeit. Those rendezvous were even sweeter than those at the house of her friend, who had not yet become Umm Salama. But Osama was killed in a flash, leaving her with a gift in her belly. Had her mother not noticed what was happening, she herself would have been killed long ago.

Badia does not like to remember how she got out of that disaster. Her mother was clever enough to save her from death, but the foetus died after birth — boy or girl, her mother wouldn’t say and she did not ask. She had felt delivered of a heavy burden when her mother told her it was dead and disappeared into the corridor of the private hospital in Jerusalem which she had snuck her into, with the help of a women’s association specialised in protecting girls of this type.

A terrible void took the place of the disaster. A void from chest to womb that has stayed with her ever since. She has filled it with laughter, with solving the problems of her colleagues, washing the dead, this occupation she walked into after her mother died and she could not find a woman in the hospital to wash and shroud her. She took on the task herself, unafraid. It gave her a serenity she had not had before, a tremendous sense of calm. All of which made her leap to accept a job offer washing the dead. Since that day she has contented herself with a simple life spent observing the sorrows and joys of others.

The girl spread out on the slab before her moves between her hands so pliantly it strikes fear into Badia’s heart. She pours water on her head and searches for marks of violence on her body, trying to reconstruct the girl’s story. She goes back to the file: raised in an orphanage, born in October 1990. Badia’s heart beats faster. She returns to the body and lifts the torso to wash the back. The girl’s upper body relaxes into Badia’s arms. Her head lies on Badia’s left shoulder as if she were sleeping. The girl is calm, as if resting in her mother’s embrace. Badia does not fight back the tears which begin to run down her cheek. With the girl’s head still on her shoulder, she weeps. How sorry she is for this girl no one is waiting for. But she was a mother, that much was clear. Where is her child? Its father?

She rushes back to the file. Was she single? The child born out of wedlock? Was she poisoned to get rid of it? Back and forth between the body and the file, Badia approaches the head, cleans the nostrils, opens the mouth and passes her fingers between the lips as usual. When she turns the face to the right to clean the left ear, the eyelids fall open. The eyes are fixed on her. She knows this look. Very like the look she had given her mother on learning that her newborn was dead. A look of complete surrender, acceptance, release.

Samah enters the autopsy room. Badia comes back to her senses and tries to hold it together, but Samah is not paying attention. She is devastated, in tears. Badia leaves the body outstretched, covers it with a sheet again and turns to Samah, who is ready to tell her all. It is as Badia had suspected: Samah has given birth to a child out of wedlock. The man she loved had not promised to marry her, but she was convinced he would after the child was born. The baby was born in Ramallah, far from the eyes of her family — she told them she was there for a training workshop. Now she goes to breastfeed the child, which she leaves with his father, on her work breaks. But the man tried to suffocate the child with a pillow to get rid of it. Samah is at a loss, caught between wanting to protect her child from its father, and the fear that her family would find out.

Badia takes Samah’s hand and tells her everything will be all right. But first she has to prepare this girl as well as she can. Samah relaxes at once, watching Badia perform the finest ceremony she has seen: out of her bag she takes Indian incense, a copper bowl, white cloth, Nablus soap, jasmine cologne, a tape of Abdul Basit reciting the Quran. This she slips into an old machine and his voice begins to chant the Sura of Women as she goes on washing the girl, with precise instructions for Samah to move her this way and that. She pours water on her pubis, on her thighs, then takes the copper bowl and begins to collect the water dripping off her body. She lays the bowl on the table with great reverence.

Then she dries the body well and wraps it in layer after layer of bright white cloth. From a distance, she sprays cologne around the body, then comes to sit quietly beside her, holds her to her chest and cries for a long time to the amazement of Samah, who did not expect to see powerful Badia behaving as a mother who has lost her child.

Her task completed, Badia asks Samah to tell the officials that the body is ready to go. She sits at her table, lights a cigarette. Then Badia asks Samah for the man’s address, insisting that she will not approach him before telling her first.

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The following day, Badia slowly makes her way across Library Street, stopping to pick jasmine from the garden of the deserted house she passes on her daily walk to the hospital. At the Parliament Roundabout, she meets Umm Salama, who asks whether the girl with psoriasis had come to visit her. The answer is no: it seems the girl did not believe her when she told her that Badia would cure her with a bowl of magic water in which she washes the dead. Sorry as she is for the girl, Badia can do nothing for those who don’t believe. Umm Salama dips her head in agreement. Samah is waiting anxiously at the door of the autopsy room and comes down on her with questions: what has she done? The father of her child called the night before, begging her to marry him.

Badia smiles, fishing from her bag the copper bowl. “My magic water cures all sorts of ills,” she says. And she remembers the look on the young man’s face as she wielded the bowl of magic water and told him that this water would scar his body with a permanent rash if he did not marry Samah. At the sound of the name Badia, the corpse washer from Ramallah Hospital about whom he had heard so much, he shook with terror and passed out.

Badia asks for the day’s schedule without giving Samah the chance for further questions. No dead today: the schedule is blank. Badia sighs, removes her coat, puts on her clean white gown, and drinks the special tea of herbs she brewed herself.

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Badia’s Magic Water” by Maya Abu-Alhayyat, and if you enjoyed that then I think the first port of call would, naturally, be the anthology from which it was taken and which Maya edited: The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction, published by Comma Press and readily available in paperback and e-book, as you prefer. Maya also has four poetry collections and four novels herself; the latest are the collection _You Can Be the Last Leaf, _2022, as translated by Fady Houdah, and the novel No-one Knows Their Blood Type, as translated by Hazem Jamjoum.

Poetry is one of those arts where I had the joy beaten out of it by the education system, and I’ve only returned to it latterly; it turns out the joy of poetry, at least in my experience, is in sitting in the ambiguity and emotion of not fully understanding it consciously, but instead letting it resonate at a deeper level, where the truth can echo unhindered by prejudices and pre-existing notions. Which is to say, I enjoy poetry in exactly the opposite way as it was taught to me. As the arts go, though, I think it is unparalleled at expressing a perspective and a sentiment in the most direct way, even as it broaches it indirectly: nothing else gets so much across in so short a space, I think. As Maya herself put it in an interview on translation[1]: “poetry itself is a translation of a language that is not originally understood.”

So today, let us talk about Palestinian poetry a little. Our author today, Maya Abu-Alhayyat, is of course one such poet, with four collections out: What She Said About It (2007), That smile… that heart (2012), Home Dresses and Wars (2016) and her latest, You Can Be the Last Leaf (2022). There’s a number of her poems available online for free at poets.org, poetryfoundation.org and the LA Review of Books, and as much as I would love to read them out loud in full for you, we don’t have those rights, so you must instead suffer me quoting lines that particularly resonated, and accept my encouragement to go seek them out in full yourself, or follow the links in the website post for this episode.

Maya lives and works in Jerusalem, and this experience soaks through her poetry; as she describes herself in the opening lines of We[2]:

Yes, we
who raise our flags on every occasion,
mention Palestine twenty times in a sentence,
afraid to laugh for too long,
guilty over our fleeting small joys,
we the pursued
over our identities,
our places of birth,
and especially our burial lots…

which continues on to express, in so few and such selective words, the dissonance of trying to find happiness in a life that delivers so much sadness, the guilt of surviving, of having reasons for joy in circumstances that deliver such regular grief. The theme of being invisible to your colonizers recurs, too: in Massacres[2], Maya writes

I’ve learned how friends forget me
and, if I’m lucky, my enemies as well.

and then in the closing lines of Sex[3]:

This is enmity:
it affords us the luxury
of being forgotten,
though like pleasure
it never forgets us.

Above all, though, it is grief that informs these poems, I think, in three flavours: personal grief, and shared grief, and grief for what could have been instead of these daily horrors. In A Road for Loss[4], Maya first asks

Do you know a road for loss
that doesn’t end
in a settlement?

and then laments

I don’t dare to speak.
Whatever I speak of happens.
I don’t want to speak.
I’d rather be lost.

The title alone speaks volumes in Mothers Arrange Their Aches at Night[5], and expresses the shared grief, the awful bond of Palestinians:

mothers feel sadness for mysterious reasons,
like sadness over other mothers
who stand in public streets
holding photos of their sons’
well-groomed faces

But there is one poem in particular that crushes my heart, and if you read no other of these poems in full, please seek this one out: I Suffer a Phobia Called Hope[6]

Each time I hear that word
I recall the disappointments
that were committed in its name:
the children who don’t return,
the ailments that are never cured,
the memory that’s never senile,
all of them hope crushed
beneath its wings as I smash
this mosquito on my daughter’s head.

There are, of course, many other Palestinian poets you might seek out, including Fady Joudah who translated the above poems from Arabic. One other I want to highlight in particular, though is Naomi Shihab Nye, who this autumn received the Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement and proven mastery in the art of poetry from the Academy of American Poets[7]. As the Academy chancellor said in bestowing this award, “Naomi Shihab Nye has borne witness to the complexities of cultural difference that connect us as human beings, evidencing a firm commitment to the poet as bearer of light and hope. In celebrating her Palestinian heritage with a gentle but unflinching commitment, her body of work is a rare and precious living entity in our time, when the tragic conflict between Gaza and Israel threatens to deepen wounds and resentments everywhere. Rooted in the profound influence of her family’s love of their culture, Nye’s commitment to hope establishes her as one of the most important poet ambassadors in our time.”

Naomi has over 30 collections, so I have tried to pick out the poems that express hope for a better future–though inevitably, the Palestinian experience means that such hope is always tinged with something else. Different Ways to Pray[8] is a beautiful, evocative piece, full of details and perspectives:

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.

In My Wisdom[9], she opens

When people have a lot
they want more

When people have nothing
they will happily share it

though in a later stanza, the truth of Palestinian occupation is expressed with the blessing

Welcome to every minute
Feel lucky you’re still in it

Such moments of hope are often turned to tragedy, as with the history of Palestine itself, where intifadas and accords are betrayed and twisted; My Uncle’s Favourite Coffee Shop[10] speaks of her

Uncle who finally left in a bravado moment
after 23 years, to live in the old country forever,
to stay and never come back,
maybe it would be peaceful now,
maybe for one minute,
I cannot tell you—how my heart has settled at last.

but must end, it feels inevitably so, with

I cannot tell—

how we felt
to learn that the week he arrived,
he died.

But there are times where the inverse is true: where instead of hope turning to grief, the opposite might be true, and from grief can come hope. Of all the poems I’ve quoted today, I would like to end on Jerusalem[11], which opens

I’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.

and closes:

There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It’s late but everything comes next.

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As much as I am trying to make this month’s outros about Palestinian joy, the unavoidable truth is that the citizens of Gaza are suffering in historic, unconscionable ways. For each episode of this special month, I will donate to a different charity supporting the people of Gaza, and I ask you to do the same, if you are able–to all of them alongside me, to one of them, or to another that you find closer to your heart, but please, help if you can. This week I’ll be donating to Medical Aid for Palestine: you can find out more about their work, and make your donation, at map.org.uk. Thank you.