Agios Lazarus

Three o’clock. Daybreak riding on fire. A nightmare coming from the sea. Roosters made of metal. Smoke… I plugged my ears with cotton and went to sleep after hearing the last newscast. It didn’t report I was dead. That means I’m still alive.

—Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (trans. by Ibrahim Muhawi)

The woman was old when she finally returned to the island.

Disembarking from the plane and stepping onto the tarmac, she recognized the light there, its special quality. She thought of a famous painting of boats on water, Monet’s La Grenouillère, and of how the sunlight danced on the green waves when she first arrived on the island by ship, decades before. She and everyone else on the ship had been given a second chance at life.

Why had she decided to come back?

The woman checked in to a small guesthouse. The air inside smelled musty, like a crypt, but the floors were well swept and shone like marble. A young lady behind a desk smoking a cigarette was in no hurry to assist her. Faded blue and gold icons stared down on them from a mosaic on the wall.

“Room 06,” the young woman said, holding out a key attached to a plastic boat-shaped keychain that dangled from her palm. She acknowledged the older woman, who was peering up at the icons.

“Those are from Agios Lazarus,” she said. “You’ll want to visit the church, see the relics. All the tourists go there. It closes early, though.” She pulled out a bright map that looked like it had been produced for children and spread it on the counter, pointing out the path with one lime-green fingernail. The church was a short walk away along the shore.

There was no one to help with her bags, and the woman had a bad left shoulder, so taking her luggage to her room would require two trips. Left was sinistra in Italian, someone had told her once. Her shoulder was sinister, indeed; untrustworthy. She was alone and had no family, and as she aged, her body had begun to betray her. The woman hoisted one bag on her right shoulder. She had learned a long time ago that it was important to have a plan when carrying things: to leave one’s hands free, just in case.

After crossing an open courtyard and a garden overgrown with weeds, she entered a corridor. Her room was a tiny, tomb-like space with white walls and a door with a curved top that fit snugly into the stone. She retrieved both bags and sat on the narrow bed, massaging her shoulder with the opposite hand and watching dust particles mingle with light coming in from a small, square window. A basket of yellow flowers adorned a nearby table.

She thought, then, of the country across the sea from the island, the country she once fled. She thought of the yellowed walls of the university campus, and the cats, winding their way through the stone paths, and the Mediterranean-style buildings, faded by years and sun. She and the other teachers used to sit outside at dusk before the war, smoking in the dwindling light and watching the sea slip up over the rocks and take them, one by one.

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When the woman first arrived on this island by ship, many years before, she had been living in the country across the sea. She taught classes at a university there as a visiting professor. During the long, hot nights, she liked to lean out over the concrete wedge of her balcony and watch people watching soccer in the street on giant televisions. She was friendly with the neighbors and often waved to their children on the balcony, and they waved back.

The woman had fallen in love with a man teaching at the university with her, then. She had never told him of her love, and she was sure he did not love her in return, which was fine, in the end, it was fine, she told herself, as she lay in scratchy cotton sheets night after night in her studio apartment. But sometimes she imagined holding his body next to hers. “The heart wants what it wants,” a scientist friend told her once, as if the phrase explained something; his profession lent the words a heavy weight. But there was very little you could do if someone did not love you back. Longing for people who did not want you was, in the end, pointless. It was like longing for the war not to have happened.

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The woman was brushing her teeth one evening and half-listening to the news on the radio when she heard an announcement: a neighboring country was attacking them by air, land, and sea. She stopped, her mouth open in surprise, and a white mass of toothpaste intermingled with saliva fell out of her mouth and onto the carpet. She followed a strange impulse to look out the window. The children across the street were also staring out of their window. They looked frightened, and she waved at them as if to say it was okay, it was all okay, which was a stupid thing to communicate, since they had parents, of course, and what did she know, anyway. They didn’t wave back.

“I’m all right,” she wrote in an email to friends the next day. “Everything is fine.” They were bemused. “What do you mean?” they wrote back. The attack hadn’t appeared on any of their news broadcasts. It would be several days until the war received coverage back home, and by that time many people would be dead, and the world would be a different place.

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The university shut down. The horizon changed—a line of ships assembled, a naval blockade. The other country began a heavy bombing campaign in the south. On television, a top general from the other country said he planned to “turn the clock back twenty years.” He used words like fire and conflagration. The prime minister of the country that was being attacked also appeared on television, and begged the international community to broker a ceasefire. “We are not at war,” he explained. A militant group was involved in a border skirmish; they kidnapped two soldiers. It made no sense to attack an entire country in return. This type of collective punishment must stop.

The president of a wealthy, powerful country also gave a televised address. He upbraided the prime minister. ”They are our allies,” he said. ”They have a right to defend themselves.”

The prime minister was silent, then, as if he knew what was about to happen.

The woman turned off the television and left her apartment to take a short walk before curfew. As she walked, she thought of the man she secretly loved. She had watched him from a distance, thought him handsome. While collating papers in the copy room their hands had brushed, once. A shock of electricity had passed through her.

They had spoken a little, then, and one other time, while waiting in line for coffee before their classes. He had moved to the city recently with his wife and two children. She wanted children too—she had no family to speak of—but though she was not quite old, she was not young. She supposed it wouldn’t happen. “I’m sure that isn’t true,” he replied, smiling. His eyes were very kind. He was probably staying somewhere close by with his family now. A small, sad wave of jealousy washed over her.

A few blocks from her apartment, she stopped. The country who had declared war on them had dropped a large burlap sack of propaganda leaflets from the sky, creating a giant crater in a soccer field. A man with a long, thin rake was trying to scrape the clods of dirt back into place.

“Imagine if children had been playing there,” an older woman muttered to herself, picking her way through the leaflets, gold bracelets clanking. “Imagine dying because a bag of worthless paper fell on your head.” The neighbor children played soccer there often. Maybe the man’s children played there as well. The woman imagined it.

She picked up a handful of leaflets. They were pastel-colored, pink and green, as if pulled from the pages of a coloring book but featured cartoon drawings of people running for cover from falling bombs. the resistance is protecting the nation…? the nation is the victim of the resistance!!! the pamphlets read. It was a warning to evacuate. There was a drawing of a half snake, half man; the leader of the militant group. His mouth was open in a howl of anger, surprise, or fear.

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The war arrived in the city slowly, then all at once—not unlike how some people describe falling in love.

The first thing the nearby country targeted was infrastructure: bridges, water, electrical sources. Using weaponry shipped to them by powerful countries they shelled the airport. They shelled the airport again. They shelled it, for some reason, three times. Then, they targeted entire neighborhoods, destroying them systematically. People fled the south and took shelter in the university.

The woman and other people in the city squatted in their homes, stopped showering to conserve water, grew dirty and pungent with sweat, watched the television when there was electricity, drank, smoked, brewed coffee, drank the coffee, brewed more. They fearfully watched the sky. Her hair began to fall out in clumps. She found them scattered around the shower drain and tried to gather them, but eventually gave up and let the hair accumulate.

A fellow teacher told her his brother’s house in the south had been flattened, and afterward, their parents searched the grass for his body parts, trying to reassemble their son, to bury him. He had a faraway look in his eye, like he couldn’t believe the story was real, even as the words spilled from his mouth. The prime minister lived a few streets away from the university, in an impossibly tall building made of glass overlooking the sea. If the other country shelled his building, they would all die. The woman wondered who would piece her back together.

The university offered her shelter in a student dormitory, but she didn’t want to leave her apartment. There she had a television, and could watch the news and brew as much coffee as she wanted in the mornings. There, she had the semblance of autonomy. The nearby country littered the orchards with cluster bombs, making harvesting crops impossible, inducing famine, seeding the soil with terror for centuries to come. In the early morning hours, she woke to the sound of falling bombs and prayed she wouldn’t die, not like this, but soon realized that it was out of her control. There was a terrible beauty in that, the giving up. A weightless sensation, like floating.

Sometimes, in bed, her addled brain sought out the man she loved. She imagined she was his wife, and his children were her children. During the rolling blackouts, she pictured them huddled together in flickering candlelight, holding hands. It seemed shameful to be choking on unrequited love while death sank its tentacles into everything, even the ground.

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The woman moved into the dormitory. There was safety in numbers. But perhaps the rules were reversed. Maybe banding together made them a target. No one knew what the country attacking them would do. On the balcony one evening, she saw a missile soar in from the line of ships on the horizon and slam into the top of another building. The building was empty, the inhabitants had fled, but she heard loud wailing from nearby: the sound of a man crying. She went back inside, knelt on the low bed, and put her head in her arms and wept.

The radio, the television, and the university administration, whose voices combined into one confused mass of disinformation and recycled rumors, began to speak vaguely about evacuations, exit routes, plans of escape. Nights, the other teachers sat outside on wooden benches and smoked and drank and exchanged news. Each evening she hoped to see the man who possessed her heart but he was nowhere to be found. Her need to see him grew until her skin itched with the all-consuming desire. This was accompanied by flashes of jealousy. How dare he hide himself away with his wife and children, when just a glimpse of his face would bring her comfort? She thought of his kind eyes, the electricity that clearly existed between them.

The woman offered to help prepare and serve food in the dining halls. The people who came and stood in line looked exhausted. Their eyes were bloodshot, their faces subdued, frightened. When she wasn’t preparing or serving food, she paced, talked out loud to herself, or tried to make conversation with the teachers. Some of them, like her, were from elsewhere. Many others had family in the south who had been killed, homes that had been destroyed. A professor who came from the country that was bombing them cried incessantly. “They’ll kill us all, I know they will,” she said over and over. “I know how this works. This is what they do.” A lecturer was convinced an army from his country would arrive to save them. “They’re coming. I promise. We just need to be patient,” he said. They watched the sky, pretended this granted them some element of control, and waited.

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Later in the day, the woman left her room at the guesthouse and walked in the direction of the church of Lazarus. The shore was quiet; there were only a few people selling bright things in carts. She thought about how in the language of the country she had fled, the body of water in front of her was called the middle white sea. She was struck by the poetic nature of this name, especially given the fact that it was so dangerous: many migrants and refugees still crossed in flimsy boats, borne upon the waves by plastic, breath, and prayers. As she walked to the church, the woman stared at the diaphanous water, the bottles collecting on the sand.

▴ ▴ ▴

The leave-taking was, as expected, chaotic.

The students and teachers from wealthy, powerful countries disappeared first; a special-ops team came and whisked them away from their beds in the night. For the rest, there weren’t that many options. If you had an embassy with a presence there, you could likely get on an evacuation list, but there was no indication of how long it would take. She had an embassy, so she was put on a list. But many others had no embassy and no plan of escape. They effectively ceased to exist to the outside world.

One road presented a viable exit route. Rumors spread: one must pay an enormous sum of money, in cash, to cross the border. But the road was not safe. The country that was shelling them had killed a family of eight in a minivan who were trying to flee; they had all burned alive on the asphalt. The bombs kept falling.

“I think it’s worth it,” one of her students said, and left that day, hitching a ride in a microbus. Weeping and hugging one another, several of the teachers left as well. The woman watched carefully, but her love was conspicuously absent. He must have decided to wait out the shelling. She would leave by sea, or not at all. Death came from the sea, in the form of shiny, metal tubes that decimated buildings, but so did life, in the greater sense. Maybe the waves would grant her a second chance.

One day, weeks later, the call came.

The university told the woman to leave her suitcases behind and only bring what she could carry on her back. She must keep her hands free in case she needed to climb things. Cliffs? Rocks? Swinging ladders, from helicopters? No other information was provided.

She packed a backpack, locked the rest of her belongings in the room, and boarded a bus to the harbor. She joined a river of solemn-looking families from different countries. They lined up to board a cargo ship with a cavernous steel hold. Not everyone had received the message about carrying things; hundreds of people brought suitcases and personal belongings, which took up far too much space. There were so many suitcases that there wasn’t room for everyone on the boat. She was one of the last ones admitted onto the long walkway.

The crowd behind her grew angry; voices rose and fell as people argued with the soldier standing at the entrance. The woman hesitated. Just before she stepped on the metal bridge, a hand grasped her shoulder. She looked at the hand and her eyes followed the arm up to the face of its owner. It was the other teacher—the man with the kind eyes. The woman began to sweat.

He, too, was trying to leave, he explained. Her love spoke slowly, though his eyes were bright and seemed to dance in his face. “My youngest is sick,” he said, motioning behind him. Would she consider switching places with him, so that he could get his daughter medical help? They were letting families stay together. She could take the next boat, which was supposed to arrive tomorrow.

The woman shifted the backpack uneasily from one shoulder to the other. She opened her mouth to say yes. Her eyes drifted to his wife, sitting on the edge of the dock with the two children, running one hand through long, thick hair. The tiny, flickering flame of jealousy in her chest whooshed into a full-blown fire. She shook her head.

“That’s not possible.” The woman did not meet his eyes. “I’m very sorry, but that’s not possible at all.” She was next in line, she said, so they would have to wait for the next ship, but she was sure it would come soon (she wasn’t sure of this at all). She turned and strode up the walkway, her arm burning where he had touched her.

In the middle of the night, the woman awoke to shouting. She looked down from the upper deck where she had been sleeping, huddled in a group with the other teachers, and saw many people grasping for food and water while men in uniform held rations aloft, above their heads. They had docked with a merchant marine ship in the night to receive supplies. Families with children were supposed to receive the food first. The children, however, kept going back and back and back until all the food had been given to them. Hundreds of people had nothing to drink or eat for many hours. The air on the boat grew desperate. Later, rumors spread that a person had died of heart failure. The woman watched as a body wrapped in a shroud was given a short burial ceremony, then tossed off the side of the boat in the moonlight. The waves seemed to rise up to receive it, though it could have been a trick of the light.

▴ ▴ ▴

When they reached the island, journalists pointed television cameras at their tired faces. Embassy representatives lined up to greet them—all men in ill-fitting suits, sweating in the sun. One man was handing out sandwiches wrapped in clear plastic.

“Good luck,” he said. The woman ran her fingers over her worthless airplane ticket in her pocket. Her shirt had become stiff and starched with sweat. In her backpack, she only carried a knife, some valuable books she had used for her lessons, some toiletries, one change of clothes.

Another teacher’s husband had reserved two rooms at a guesthouse; several of them stayed there together. They slept on couches and floors and three to a bed. For days, they moved around the sleepy island streets, smoking, nervously drinking small cups of sludgy coffee, whiskey. They jumped or flinched when someone slammed a door. A student she recognized found a plastic hose and did a beer bong in the street surrounded by cheering classmates, while elderly tourists looked on disapprovingly. They drank, fucked, laughed out loud, performed life a thousand different ways. They were ravenous for life.

No one wanted to think of the thousands of people left behind: the students and teachers and friends who disappeared, the drawn faces of the other refugees, the neighbors’ children, the man and his family waiting on the dock. It was useless to dwell on the past.

In the years that followed, the collective amnesia spread. It was just a small, short war that barely registered on the news. The world wiped it from memory, like a bad breakup. The world forgot the war had happened.

▴ ▴ ▴

By the time she reached the doors of the church, she had spent too long meandering by the shore. She pushed through large wooden doors carved with icons and sat down to rest on a pew inside. Her knees ached, and she looked around. The building had three domes, and the sloping brick was covered with brightly painted images of saints. Two men at a table nearby played checkers.

“We’re closed now,” one said, standing up. She stood as well, with an apologetic smile. She was hoping she could see the saint’s relics. She had come a very long way.

The two men spoke quietly, gesturing with their hands. The first turned back to her.

“We must be quick. Come with me.”

They descended a steep staircase. Dripping candles set in wall sconces illuminated the stones underfoot. At the bottom, the air contained a whiff of rot, and of the eternal.

“Here,” the man said, switching his cigarette to the other hand and crossing himself. “They’re in there.”

A stone sarcophagus sat in the center of the room. The woman stared, asked if she could touch it. He nodded once, curtly, his eyes darting toward the stairs. “You’re kind. Thank you,” she said, then turned toward the sarcophagus.

She let her fingers graze the top of the tomb.

The woman didn’t know what she was expecting, but it felt cold, as stone should. She lingered there, thinking about how many people had passed their hands over the same place, trying to access the collective memory it contained.

She had learned recently that the man she loved so many years ago was dead; he and his family were taking shelter in a building that was shelled the same week she had left on the ship. Upon learning this news, she had booked a flight to the island.

What bothered her most, strangely, once the shock had worn off, was that she couldn’t even remember his face. Though she could easily recall details after, like the smell of the island when she arrived, a mixture of dust and some sort of native plant and the sweet scent of alcohol spilled on pub tables and smoke and the wind coming off the sea, everything about the man, even his name, escaped her. She had buried him too deep.

She had also heard on the news that the war—the war that everyone had forgotten because, after all, there was no use in dwelling in the past—was happening again. Forgetting had stopped nothing, prevented nothing. The woman had come back, hoping to understand the greater meaning of it all. But there was only the caress of smooth, cold stone under her fingertips.

She turned and walked back up the steps with the church custodian, thanked the two men, and dropped some coins in a box by the door. Retracing her steps on the rocky path, the woman returned to the beach where she stopped and stared at the horizon in the direction of the country she had left. The arbitrary sea, which gave and took away life, was sweeping up over the rocks as the light faded. With unsteady steps she waded out, and the waves seemed to rise to greet her once more. She lifted one hand, reaching, stumbling, grasping at the past, trying to remember, too late, as if that would change something, catching only wet spray between her fingers.