The New Shirt

Ten o’clock. The cigarette in my hand has burned to a butt. I don’t even notice that the fire’s gone out. I’ve been sucking a cold stick for the past hour. Cries arise from the wards behind the automatic swing doors.

Shrieks, guttural and almost beastlike, drown the soft music playing from the ceiling’s speakers. Not that I am even listening to either the screams or the music. It’s too cold to concentrate on anything in here.

I walk towards the doors and they sweep open on whirring motors. I’ve been dancing with those motors since morning, and have grown to like the power I have over them.

"No, I can’t take it." a voice sobs hysterically from one of the wards along the sterile corridor. "Take it out! Please take it out, doctor!"

Is that Husha? No, the voice is too deep. The doors swing close, muffling the woman’s agony and joining two halves of a sign that proclaims in Hebrew and Arabic: No Smoking beyond this point!

I’m running out of cigarettes and my lighter has run out of fluid. Not a good time to starve. The wait is terrible. I’ve been waiting for eight hours and it’s not going to end anytime soon.

A nurse passes by and looks at me strangely.

"Are you alright, sir?" she asks.

I nod and smile.

"Sure?" she insists with the good nature of someone who has known no tragedy in her life.

"Yes."

"Don’t worry, sir. I’m sure your wife will be out shortly."

"She’ll be fine," I reply, more to assure myself.

Thankfully, the nurse moves away, a prim smile pasted on her face.

I drop my spent cigarette into a shiny bin and sit in one of the orange, plastic chairs beside it. It is too large, too hard. I jump back up and the doors swing open again. The harsh cry of an infant trickles through, and I am sure Husha has delivered. My baby is safe! A voice in my mind shouts out triumphantly. My baby is safe! True enough, before the doors shut, I see a green-robed doctor emerge from Husha’s ward. I move back and step forward. The motors whir and the doctor comes through. The smell of antiseptic is strong.

"Mister Muhammad?" the doctor speaks fluent Arabic. Not a good sign since this means he works for the military. "Mister Muhammad, are you?"

I nod.

"Husha," I manage to croak.

"She is fine," says the doctor, eyes traveling down to my shirt.

"My baby?" I dare not wait for the answer. I feel like running away before he can open his mouth to answer such a foolish question.

The doctor looks back up.

"I’m sorry, Mister Muhammad. The child…he’s dead."

"Why?" I sputter. "Why? Aren’t you a good doctor?"

"I am," he returns with a paternal look. "But the boy…shrapnel penetrated the womb and lodged into his back. Shattered his spine," he shook his head as if to marvel that so much damage could be done with so little. "I couldn’t save him. I’m truly sorry, Mister Muhammad."

I stumble backwards, falling into one of the plastic seats. It still feels hard, unyielding, so unlike the cushions that my beloved Husha makes.

"I have a son?"

"You had a son, Mister Muhammad," the doctor corrects gently, staring again at my shirt.

I grasp the sides of my seat, not really understanding.

The doctor moves to the opposite wall and picks up a newspaper from a rack. He stares a moment at the front page and grins.

"Look here," he says, turning the page towards me.

I see a color photograph filling up almost the entire paper. I cannot read the spidery words printed on the Jerusalem Post, but the picture is enough. It shows the site of another suicide bombing, very much like the one that had injured Husha at the roadblock. Although the people in the photograph are frozen in time, I know, somehow, that they are running about, shouting, screaming. There are roars and sirens only I can hear.

"Look," says the doctor, pointing at the corner of the photograph. "Don’t you see? It’s you."

It is! There I am- a desperate face amongst other desperate faces. A face that is sad and resigned, with eyes that are looking sideways in the hope that someone, perhaps someone beyond the frame of this photograph, would come help him carry the beautiful woman in his arms to a safe place. But no one came, and the photographer was too busy capturing the devastation for the news wires.

The suicide bomber had turned up at a place I had gone to beg for food- food that my pregnant Husha needed. I had brought Husha along because I thought that the young Israeli soldiers manning the post would take pity on me and hand out some of their rations. They were kids. They had mothers. And not all of them were beasts.

What I got instead was a bomb, and through the bomb, the death of my son.

Did the suicide bomber have a mother too? Was she weeping over her own son? Or was she even now celebrating her son’s bravery?

"I’ll cut this out and paste it on the wall of my office," the doctor says sympathetically. "And the hospital fees…they’ll be paid by the IDF."

"IDF?" I stumble on the letters.

"The Israel Defense Forces. It’s reviewed your case and decided to compensate you."

"Tha…thank you," I reply. "Can I see my Husha now?"

"Yes, of course," the doctor smiles expansively. "Come, I’ll bring you to her."

The doors open and I walk through them, at last. I don’t notice the cries of the other women, the first bawling of the other newborns. All I want to do now is see Husha- kiss her and tell her that even though our son is gone, we still have each other.

"The shirt you are wearing," says the doctor from behind me. "Do you like it?"

I turn around, not really believing what the doctor is asking.

"It’s soft…comfortable."

He smiles in satisfaction.

"I bought it from United States. I donated it last week and here it is, on you. I must say, you look smart in it."

"Do you have a son, doctor?" I ask.

The doctor looks at me in surprise.

"Why, I do. He’s twenty-two this year, serving in the Army, in fact."

"If I were you, doctor, I would have given this shirt to him."

I turn and walk towards Husha’s ward.

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