16
When I opened my eyes as heavy as lead, it was dawning already and the flames that had swallowed not only the school building but also the entire settlement long gone. The village was thus quiet again, peaceful almost, as if nothing had ever happened.
I lay in the sleeping quarters. I do not even recall how I ended up here, how I managed to escape inferno, but my body was whole and my skin unmarked by the relentless fire. Whatever had happened had now ended and brought me back to the present, far from the nightmares of the past and the untold lives harvested untimely in the dead of a distant night.
I sat for a long time, the morning sun crawling across the floorboards, washing the room in a soothing light and bringing along the events of whatever had transpired, whatever I had just survived. My chest heaved, my hands shook beyond control, as if the fire had not only etched itself into my distraught mind, but also onto the very marrow of my bones. I tried to speak, tried to call out – anything – but the words failed me. Everything failed me...
And yet, I knew this was not just some hallucination, a vile product of my mind pulling my legs to see the extent of my affliction. Stranger still, all of this, I was certain, was my aunt’s doing, or whatever remained of her soul, twisting through the smoke, demanding that I see what she too had witnessed, find her and bring her peace, but not only that. She wanted more. She wanted me to leave traces of what had really happened here, what religious fanatics had stolen in the name of God, and what they had tried to erase. Every step I had taken, every corner I had turned, every child I had failed to save – it was all part of a greater scheme, a map, if you will. A map she had drawn before the flames consumed her, too. The village, the fire, the screams... They were all messages and memories made flesh and spirit, demanding that someone remember, that someone carry their voices forwards into a world that had already forgotten what it once called a free Palestine.
I knew, then, that she would visit me again. Somewhere in the labyrinth of this harrowing place, somewhere in the ruins of a past long-since forgotten, she would guide me and pull me deeper into the past so that I might bring it into the present. And I, the last thread left alive in this inheritance of ashes, would have to follow, even if it meant I too would burn.
I rose from the floor; my limbs were stiff and body aching as if I had been carrying the weight of the entire village on my shoulders. The sun no longer felt warm as I stood up; it felt like a disgusting lie. Outside, the alleys and lanes were silent, the charred walls hiding nothing and everything at once. I knew the loop would reset again, that in a few hours or moments, time itself would bend and bring me back. Don’t ask me why I thought that. I just did, you know? Deep in my bones, in the marrows, in my stiff veins, in the way my chest rose and fell, and in the way each inhale left a gaping hole inside me – I just knew.
But I was scared too, witless and afraid of now not only my mind, but also my own shadow in this horrid place filled with the blood of the innocent. But I did not leave the property and return home. How could I? To leave would be to betray them, to let them vanish into the void they had already been forced into, where their screams would forever go unheard and their deaths unnoticed. Because if I too left and saved my own skin, then truly, there would be no one left to remember. Knowing this, how could I turn away from the truth that had chosen me? Perhaps my arrival to this place was Neve Emek’s last attempt to bring justice to the lives lost untimely and the numerous children condemned as terrorists before their flowers blossomed.
A tear trickled down my cheek then and I wiped it with the back of my hand, before my eyes fell on something on the floorboards. The photograph. It lay where I had collapsed, the edges curled and stained with ash, but whole against the odds, the children in rows, faces frozen in time, the smiles on their faces stolen along with their lives.
I picked it up and felt the weight of it in my hands. It wasn’t just paper, after all, but proof. Proof that it had happened. Proof that the village, the flames, the children had not been some lie. I even recognised the two kids I tried to save, beaming wide into the camera, unaware of the fate that would befall them. Not terrorists, not heathens, not human animals, just children who did not choose their ethnicity, the country, religion, or culture there were brought up in.
I pressed the photograph to my chest, inhaling the faint smoke still clinging to it as a chill ran through me. The past, the loop, or whatever it was, had given me a gift – a proof to a reality that the world had erased already, a relic of the past that might survive even if no one would hear the screams, whether they liked it or not.
To be continued...
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