from “No One Knows Their Blood Type”
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, transl. Hazem Jamjoum | No One Knows Their Blood Type | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | October 2024 | 150 Pages
Jumana
Jerusalem, 2011
All I really want is soft bedding, with a huggable duvet I can curl up and hide under. Sometimes I wonder why I don’t just get out the cheap blanket, instead of bothering with all the hassle of making everything look pretty. Why are newlyweds obliged to get these sets with the matching, but utterly useless, frilly pillowcases? Why not just use the comfy ugly ones? I guess it’s so we can pretend to be fancy in case a guest decides to peek into our bedroom.
Thinking back, I did use that cheap cover in the first months of our marriage. Since then I’ve done what I felt I was supposed to: pointlessly spread the expensive bedcover and its fatuous pillows out every morning and fold it up all over again every evening. It would still only be the two of us who’d see it, whether it was on display in all its glory on the bed, or stuffed between the closet and the nightstand, on top of the risqué nightgowns Yara forced me to buy.
The bed in question is less our bed than it is his bed, and my bed. Each of us has their own special territory where we freely unfurl our limbs, so long as they don’t breach the invisible armistice line that the gap between our pillows creates in our minds. His pillow is about twice as long as mine, but neither of us makes much of the fact that his share of the bed is larger, or that borders shouldn’t be determined by the arbitrariness of a valley between pillows.
On my side of the border is my pillow. It’s actually two down pillows crammed into one pillowcase, with a history that stretches back to my high-school graduation. His pillow, over on the other side, has a lineage that stretches back into the last century. It’s long and stuffed with cotton, a hand-me-down from his mother. Her house is full of these battered remains of pillows, with bright yellow or sky-blue satin edges bordering the frayed and yellowed checkerboards of quilted red and brown squares that blend in seamlessly with their discordant surroundings.
Our pillow situation isn’t the result of us neglecting to buy modern, luxurious pillows to go with our new bedroom. We actually bought the very best pillows the market had to offer, almost as if to prove that we could afford whatever grade of ergonomic memory-foam our cheeks desired, or whatever was the polar opposite of the mold-and-sweat-stained fabrics of our parents’ homes. But those silky, firm pillows brought us nothing but three sleepless nights, cricks in our necks, and the snore-like sounds he produced as he jostled to find a comfortable position for his wakeful head. Ultimately, we had to admit defeat, waving away the white pillows of our surrender, and calling for reinforcements from our premarital pillows to join in the fray of our newlywed ecstasies.
From my vantage point at the far corner of my pillow, the bed appears vast; the frontier between us is a long, rectangular void. In her first months out of my womb, Shireen occupied that gap. She cried throughout the night, so we brought her into our bed, which by then was no longer the arena for much ecstasy. The void transformed; it became a cosmic horror that repelled us as far from it as possible, our bodies tensed in vigilance, lest an involuntary movement render this frightening thing, who deprived us of the mere taste of sleep, into a squished slab of basterma. Those nights dragged on, and we awaited the oft-heralded ceasefire, the one everyone said would come. At first, they said, “Wait until she’s 40 days old.” But sleep rejected our pleas. “It gets better three months in,” they said. We waited six months, then a year, but Shireen defied all predictions with impunity, leaving us to launch our hopes into each following month, bombarding any hope that she’d ever live up to the readymade formulas veteran parents proffer upon rookies like us. I imagined putting her in a cardboard box on the balcony and closing the door behind me so she would cry unheard through the night. I could see myself grasping her in my hands like a teddy bear that I’d slam into the wall and pound with kicks and blows to silence the cries once and forever more.
In truth, none of that happened. In those days I came to understand why Yara compared early motherhood to sleeping on a bed of nails, and certainty dawned on me in ways those early motherhood mornings never did.
I could not be a mother.
I felt like I was playacting the emotions mothers express: the magical feeling that supposedly descends from the heavens when they see their children for the first time. Already, the moment I placed Shireen in the Maqased Hospital’s nursery ward with the six groaning women ranting about the godsend of child-subsidy checks, I had no clue how I would be conjoined with this creature over the lifetime to come. The nurse, who hadn’t breastfed a child a day in her life, explained how to wipe my nipple and squeeze it between two fingers in order to prepare meals for the baby. “Do it every two hours,” she oozed confidently, mentioning nothing about what would happen to this breast, a breast that had been arrogant toward cold in the wintertime and rhapsodic in summertime. No, she didn’t mention that after becoming swollen and cracked from repeated suction, it would deflate like a punctured tire after the baby was done with it.
Indeed, I was no mother. Nor was I capable of being one.
Then the magic happened. It was three in the morning, and I was exhausted to the verge of keeling over as I walked, reeled in by Shireen’s incessant screams. She was in her fifteenth month. I looked at her, and she reciprocated with a violent, terrifying glare of her own. I bawled, loudly. She stared at me, intrigued. I was doing something that belonged squarely among her own duties. I leaned over the bars of her crib and told her that I was tired and wanted to sleep.
“For God’s sake,” I pleaded. “Don’t cry.”
Shireen was silenced, perhaps mortified by my pathetic appearance. She took pity, looking at me out of the corner of her eye and smiling, then granting me leave to go with a wave of her hand.
With all the world’s compassion, her eyes said: “Go now, and rest. I won’t disturb you.”
I couldn’t believe her reaction, but I complied meekly, moving slowly for fear that she might change her mind and recommence the wailing that would certainly mean another long and sleepless night. But no. Shireen slept, and I slept, and we became the best of friends.
•
The bed seems vast now that Shireen is in her own crib far from our nightly battles. I look over at Suheil, who takes off his glasses before going to bed, leaving his eyebrows startlingly thicker, and his face seemingly formless, border-free. He cradles his head in his hands and sleeps quietly. I want to shake him awake to tell him all the thoughts I’ve been keeping from him, because I think his simple mind—which has no comprehension of what a truly complicated life would look like—wouldn’t understand being woken up in the middle of the night to my demand: “Hold me.” He would think it unnecessary lunacy. But I’m scared, and the abyss between our two sides of the bed only widens.
The television brings news of earthquakes and floods and revolutions. Death is on offer, on our screens, free of charge. Revolutions everywhere—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria. I try to formulate my stance on each of them, but I can’t. I want to go out and declare a revolution against something, but I can’t. When I analyze the situation with my friend Tania, she tells me that those who have grown accustomed to oppression justify their own as the only way to remain both sane and alive. She mentions a kind of psychological phenomenon through which the oppressed develop feelings of attachment, and even compassion, for their oppressor. But I want to change. I want the courage to take an impassioned stance toward events like these. I turn my eyes away from the footage of a family slaughtered in Syria, only to catch sight of a dusty photograph of my father stowed on the shelf under the TV. It was taken when he retired, and I’ve never framed it. I remember the day he went to have that portrait taken; it was the only time I saw him in a military uniform. It had been a very long time since he was a military man, but he wanted to be remembered as a fighter. It was as if he wanted to erase the long years he’d spent sitting behind a desk, nothing moving forward in his life but his potbelly. All that was left for him was to exalt in the majesty of the few years he’d spent as a soldier, in a uniform that almost certainly looked nothing like the one in the photograph. He moved his beret around, trying different ways to get it to fit his large head and conceal his baldness. Despite all his efforts to trick the camera, he managed to hide only a small section at the crown of his head.
Since that day four years ago when I found out about the blood-type mismatch, I’ve come up with several rational explanations. Suheil refuses to entertain any logic grounded in coincidence, sorcery, or the paranormal. The first explanation, the one he champions, is that the wrong blood type may have been recorded on my father’s military ID. I don’t find that one plausible because my father had several operations in various hospitals, and someone would have caught the error.
The second possibility is that there was a mix-up at the hospital where I was born, and I was accidentally swapped with another baby. Suheil doesn’t support this theory, and neither do I because, despite everything else, I do have my mother’s brown hair and her dimples.
The third explanation is that I am not my father’s daughter, and that I’m maybe the daughter of the man who smiled at me from the picture hanging in my mother’s living room, the man who became her husband after she and my father divorced. This would mean that I’m not even Palestinian. Not only would this negate all that my life has been to date, it could seriously complicate my application for family unification so I can get the blue Jerusalem ID card.
The blood-type mismatch could also be a freak mutation of blood cells with no broader meaning, a possibility Suheil finds to be the most logical, but which I find to be a cold dashing of dreams I don’t want dashed.
I thought I could resolve the whole thing by having a DNA test performed on a single strand of Yara’s hair, but this turned out to be more complicated than I thought. These tests are only done for criminal investigations, or with both parties’ consent. Naturally, Yara refuses to even consider the possibility. She’s told me not to mention it in front of Suheil because the result could mean I was illegitimate and that could mess up my marriage. The few times she and I have talked about it, she’s escalated the conversation into a full-blown fight, as if I’d seriously disrespected her by even thinking any of these questions. Her mouth wouldn’t say it, but I could read the words in her enraged eyes: “Why do you want to abandon me? Don’t turn your presence in my life into a lie and leave me stranded, alone in my truth.” After a while I came to understand Yara’s anger. I stopped bringing it up. I felt as if I’d outgrown her when it came to this subject, and this made me sympathize with her. She doesn’t have a story that could offer her an alternative, a truth different from the one we had lived. Now, perhaps, I do.