Wadfa

It started with a carton of eggs that Zeeko took out of his parents’ fridge around 4:00 am on a Saturday and distributed between the four of us when we met downstairs. I was eight years old, so he must have been seven, and my brother, Hassuna, five. Zeeko’s sister, Lara, had just turned nine and was slowly phasing our child’s play out of her life, but on that morning, she would sneak out and save the world with us one last time. 

We walked to the Al’a, the abandoned castle that stood in ruins east of the center of our tiny city, while the world around us still slept. Soldiers of the Syrian occupation, who used it as one of their bases in the deep North at the time, brewed Turkish coffee in their makeshift kitchen upstairs, too drowsy to make anything of our conspiratory conference. The kitchen had a large, glassless window and out of it, one of the soldiers whistled at Lara and commented on her pink plastic helmet, turning right back to his friends, not waiting for a response. We’d left my brother Hassuna’s bike locked up in the building’s small lobby that morning. The castle was merely a five-minute walk away, but Lara kept her helmet on, nonetheless. The rest of us carried ours in our hands. Our meeting spot, in what used to be the castle’s garden, was a hundred-foot-wide puddle of bird shit shielded by ugly, newly built bare concrete walls. A private sphere to which we’d made up a private name, an untranslatable play on words from the Arabic referencing the absurdity of the nasty puddle being the centerpiece of what was supposed to be a mysterious superhero hideaway. The soldiers wore metal helmets and held rifles that the eggs padded with Kleenex in our pockets could only dream of being. But while they followed orders beyond their understanding or care, our mission was our own, crystal-clear creation. 

We lived in a city that belonged to us, unequivocally. We’d sneak into the local mosque’s basement and the doctor’s office that remained unlocked after hours. We’d run through the open markets and be the Power Rangers in the neighbors’ dark, moldy garages before anyone woke up. We had such an uncontested grasp on our world that my memory of it now is such that our lack of political interest could be attributed not to a childish mind but to a complete dismissal of any potential claim over what is ours, ours, firmly, forever ours. But one place felt off-limits: the yellow house in the alley across our building. 

I can’t recall how we learned that Wadfa lived there. It’s as if she’d always been there, before time, and we were born with this knowledge. We were warned, by our parents, our neighbors, our teachers, about many dangers, all of which we unheeded. We were never once warned about Wadfa. Yet, our fear of her felt so whole that it sought no words of warning nor assurances. There was no neighborhood fable, no children’s huddles with horror stories. Our brains – Hassuna’s, Lara’s, Zeeko’s, and my own, came with this idea of what she was and all the fear it instilled pre-installed like a manufacturer’s setting. Wadfa. We’d seen glimpses of her. Had we? She was a monster so terrifying that showing herself would have been superfluous. We’d run past her house with our heads turned away and our feet barely touching the ground. One look at the Monster and it was chasing you, relentlessly… to what end?  

That morning at the Al’a had been well-rehearsed. Zeeko, Hassuna, and I put on our helmets: red, black, yellow. We were about to conquer the last frontier. 

Hassuna, the youngest, and Lara, the oldest, were the most anxious, though Lara was more scared of our parents, which irritated me. Zeeko and I shook hands after he gave a pep talk stolen from Adnan Wa Lina – an anime known as Future Boy Conan in English that we’d watched, dubbed in Arabic, on repeat. I knew this speech by heart. Hassuna and Lara followed in shaking hands and when they did, the fear set in for me, too, but it was too late. My sneakers were kicking bird shit out of the way which meant we were already running towards the yellow house, hands on our pockets to protect the eggs. 

Too quickly, the house emerged, its roof bleeding down the walls with streaks of rusty water. Wild bushes and fruit trees separated the rustic metal fence from it, but not by much, standing so still in the early morning quiet broken by the frantic sound of our feet hitting the rock pavement as we ran down the alley. Without turning to look, something in me recognized that, behind me, one of us had stopped running, and that it was Lara, and that Hassuna would soon follow. I knew, if I left room in me for one more thought about what we were about to do, for one more look at the house, I would lose my courage, and then it would fall on Zeeko alone to do it, and Zeeko might do it, probably would do it but if not, we would call it off, and we wouldn’t pick it back up ever again. It would put me face-to-face with the fact that Hassuna was just there so he wouldn’t be left behind, and the fact that Lara’s barely still there, and the fact that I shouldn’t have been there, and something would die. So, I left no room. My heels lifted off the ground as I came to a standstill on my toes, arm cocked back staring at the house, and I threw the first egg. 

A few inches past my hand in the air, I could no longer follow its path with my eyes, but I listened to its sound as it flew. I had not expected a sound. I’d thrown it at one of the two small windows. Another sound when it hit the glass. An instant emptiness in me. 

Then, the true silence of twilight. 

From the corner of my eye, I saw Lara’s head then her body start to turn to the left and I knew it meant she was about to dart off toward our building. This set off a still panic in me. Returning to the building was not the plan. Reflexively, I grabbed Zeeko’s arm to keep him in place. It all took less than a second. He threw the second egg. Lara was no more than ten paces away when Hassuna dashed in her direction, taking a few quick steps before turning around and hurling all his eggs in quick succession over his shoulder as he fled, over the fence, and at the door. Zeeko and I chucked the rest of what we had with our free arms, my fingers still white-knuckling his squishy tricep. 

The yellow house’s door creaked open and he tried to run but was jolted back by his arm stuck in my hand as I froze stiff. The figure I’d had nightmares about was feet away through the metal-framed gate. She walked toward us in a nightgown. Her skin was leathery, and her eyes were bulging orbs of red constellations in yellow jelly. “Lesh?!” – Why?! – she screamed. I could see the inside of her mouth through a missing tooth. Then, one foot in front of the other in long strides, through the dream-like numbness in our legs, choking on big gulps of morning air, we were running with Lara and Hassuna.

The climb up the stairs in our building was chaos. We tripped and pushed each other out of the way and fell and crawled and held in all the sounds that crept up our throats for fear of the echo of the bare stone steps. We passed Zeeko and Lara’s apartment on the third floor. We passed our apartment on the fifth. We made it to the roof and muscled the metal door closed behind us, all leaning on it, shaking with giddiness and terror. Lara and Hassuna pressed their ears to the door while Zeeko and I crawled toward the edge of the edgeless roof to see if Wadfa was still downstairs. We could see her house. Her door was closed. She was nowhere. “I told you we shouldn’t do this,” Lara hissed. We watched the alley below for a while before standing up to walk back to our comrades. The four of us stood facing one another, Hassuna’s back still glued to the door, his face still ghostly, and I looked at them, shoulders tense and arms trembling, stunned at what we’d done. One by one, we broke into hysterical laughter, and it took me a while, a long while, not until I tried to take my next inhale and I heard its painful high pitch, to realize I was sobbing. I thought of Wadfa’s eyes, so terrifyingly bulging but so sleepy. Of her cotton blue nightgown, just like the ones grandmothers wore, the ones you would bury your face into when you wept as a small child. How were we to ever come down from this roof?

When I was much older, living in the United States, during a monthly call with my parents, my father mentioned in passing that she’d died. Wadfa. “Do you remember her, from across the old apartment in the center?” I realized I’d never thought of her in all these years. “We went to the funeral”, he said. I asked him who else was there. “She was an old widow,” he said. I asked him to put Hassuna on the phone. He scarcely recalled egging the house – a memory of a memory. But nobody else remembered this image that flashed through my mind the instant I heard she’d died: I saw her up close, kind-faced, smiling, beaming down at a bunch of small hands handing her toys, one of which I recognized as a rubber raccoon that lived on my childhood bedroom shelf long ago. She was saying something kind, I know, because of the way she tilted her head, but it was like I’d lost the audio file to this memory, so brief and surreal and fleeting. Had it happened? I tried to replay it in my mind with the same intensity as when it flashed. Was she wearing the blue nightgown? Would that mean that I imagined it all? Had I dreamt it the night after that morning when we threw the eggs? “Do you remember us giving her toys to apologize?” I pleaded with my mother over the phone, and she must have discerned my anguish. “Do you remember my raccoon toy?” 

“I think we gave most of your toys to your cousins. It was so long ago,” she deflected to give me closure, to pass on her comforting indifference, not for the death, but for the life that came before it. I called Lara later that day. Her whole family had moved to England a few years before. I told her of Wadfa’s death. I asked her if she remembered egging the yellow house. “We did that?” She gasped, sounding astonished, though right afterward, she spoke as if she wasn’t surprised, laughing, reminiscing about all the trouble we made as children and all the foolishness we thought up to do.  “I will tell Zeeko she died,” she added. “He used to be so scared of her”. 

I did not dare call Zeeko, myself. 

More years later I returned home and went back to the center where the old apartments, ours as well as Zeeko’s and Lara’s, now hosted other families. I brought a new boyfriend to walk with me through the miasma of memories, both warm and chilling, that all evoked that same feeling of cohesiveness we must find if we’re to survive this life. I wanted to point at each street, each home, each corner, and say, this is what happened to me here, or this is what I did here, and this is what I am – I am me because of all of this. Do you know me now?

I found our old building streaked with rust, its white paint yellowed and the grapevine that grabbed onto its sides and climbed all the way up to the roof in my childhood, making it so that we could all reach out of our windows to taste its fruit, was dry and dead. The Al’a was in a different kind of ruin – no longer the ancient kind you see in historic structures, but the type of ruin a building crumbles into when it knows it’s no longer wanted by anyone for anything. The soldiers of the Syrian occupation were long gone and yet, my claim to the city had never felt weaker. At the market, I was greeted warmly – politely – by merchants who remembered me, not as an integral part of the fabric of their life, but as an honored guest. Still, I told my boyfriend of all the old stories these places evoked with a hungry affection, trying to clutch on to them lest they slip away and start to belong not only to another time but to someone else entirely. 

We walked by Wadfa’s house, now overgrown with trees and vines, much smaller, much duller in color, much flimsier, but still the same. I stopped to take a better look at it and my boyfriend tried to take my hand. “We can’t do that here,” I told him and freed my fingers. He looked at the house with me in silence. 

“There’s something wrong with this house,” I finally said, after a quiet while. I wondered how to explain this ungrounding suspicion of having fantasized a life into existence. If I’d laid roots where there was no soil and would have to spend my life in fear of toppling over on poreless, slippery ground, with nothing to grab on to, at least let me blame it, somehow, on the evil aura of the surreal yellow house. “Hassuna and I were so scared of it growing up,” I said. 

“Really? It looks lovely to me,” he answered and I imagined myself as a kid, standing in the same place I did now with an egg in one hand and Zeeko’s arm in the other, hearing the words echo through time to reach that one quiet, early morning when the house was lovely, and so was she, Wadfa, and to stop us all from laying down this one more brick on the road to leaving.