I used to exercise in the neighborhood where I live in France, with a group of strangers who meet once a week. We train in the street, becoming a spectacle for passersby, moving muscles that have stiffened after most of us passed forty. There are also some young people, of course, more energetic and lively.
We got to the running part. One of the runners — in fact, everyone was ahead of me — was right in front of me. She looked at something on the ground, shook her head side to side, and glanced back at us. I assumed she had seen something disgusting, so I didn’t follow her gaze, and instead focused on controlling my breathing as I ran.
At the metro station, we ended our session in a small patch of land, as we do every Tuesday. Buses pass by, dog waste scatters around us, and mosquitoes chase us. Still, no one comes to ask, What are you doing here? We played for a full hour, then jogged back to the street where I live, near the coach. That was my good fortune; without her insistence, I wouldn’t have left the house — I rarely do anymore, not in these two years of extermination. I’ve raised my depression with every passing second of Gaza’s massacre.
On the way back, when I reached the spot that Frenchwoman had looked at with such unease, I saw a dead gray cat, probably killed by a car. My resolve dimmed. The coach urged me to keep going, but my mind began pounding like a spoon on a metal pot. I stopped, then ducked into a building, fleeing. My heart told me I knew that cat.
I went straight up to her owner’s apartment. Dishes clattered in the kitchen; dinner time — and the French are never early, never late. My neighbor Claire opened the door. I asked: “Is your cat, Zéphyr, at home?” She replied: “No. Have you seen her today?” I said: “No,” my voice trembling as I added, “There’s a dead cat in the street that looks like her. Will you come with me?”
She put on a jacket and came down. The closer we got to that gray mass on the curb, the more I felt her trembling beside me. We arrived. She looked, then said: “Yes, that’s my cat.”
I remembered the times Zéphyr sneaked into my home to eat with my cats and play with them. A beautiful, elegant, intelligent cat. I burst into sobs in the street, and her owner cried too. She wept for her cat, while I felt as if I were crying for all the dead in my faraway city. As if the accident had given me a pretext to break the dam inside me.
Her owner lifted her, ignoring the blood and the flies that had gathered on the stiff body, which meant the accident had happened earlier that morning. I was angry at the thought that no one had asked after her. Cats shouldn’t be gone from home too long; they need strict routines of coming and going so they don’t recklessly explore. And they’re not all alike in behavior; like humans, each cat has its own personality.
It was obvious the car had hit her head. I couldn’t help but see in her body the thousands of martyrs lying in my living memory of Gaza. I thought of how this smart cat could not withstand the iron of a car — a violence bigger than her. That’s exactly how extermination works: a city full of life is overtaken by a machine greater than it, ripping those clinging to life from their simple streets and the homes they spent lifetimes building, burying them beneath.
The machine of death is stronger than any living soul. Stronger than tens of thousands of fighters in Gaza. I cried for all those days I spent watching lists of martyrs’ names, terrified to find my own family among them. I cried for the cat crushed by the car instead of all the moments I stayed silent while looking at the images of my aunt, her daughter, her grandchildren, and my other relatives’ children being carried to their final burial.
This is my way of grieving; my way of surviving. I care for my cats and my neighbors’ cats while terrified of loss. That’s how I’ve always been through a life marked by three wars and division. A phobia of loss. I tried to fix myself like a mechanic patching up a broken car, especially since I arrived in France. I tried online therapy sessions. I wrote endlessly. I scolded myself. And of course, I fought with everyone in search of safety. In the end, I found myself clinging to my three cats, crying over my neighbors’ cats like the lone madwoman obsessed with hers. But it’s not just about them; it’s deeper: compensation for emptiness, helplessness, grief, and betrayal. (I forgot to mention: I also have a rabbit.)
We walked down the street — me and the cat’s owner — carrying the body. Two mourners. As if on a path of sorrows. As if I were walking in a solitary funeral. Here, it’s strange for a woman to cry in the street. In my country, women cry everywhere, especially in the street. We attracted no attention, except for a young man who lifted his sunglasses and looked at us with sympathy.
We are nobodies with nameless grief in a foreign land. Had I cried in one of our Middle Eastern streets, I would have found ten tissues and ten hands patting my shoulder. But I wasn’t crying for that. The repression burst because I buried my pain with the death of Zéphyr. I loaded the death of this beautiful little one with the extermination of another place, collapsing them into one meaning that now exploded. I wept as though I were weeping for sixty thousand lives gone with no return.
We returned home. The cat’s toys were at the doorstep. Other neighbors heard and, frightened for their own cats, brought them inside. The cat’s owner and her husband wrapped the body in large sheets of white paper and drove off in their car. I waited for them for hours. I paced the residence’s walkways between the cypress trees, anxious, replaying everything in my head. I made tea twice, coffee twice. Each time I set out an extra cup for the cat’s owner, hoping she might return to drink it. She didn’t. The last cup cooled on the windowsill and remained there.
Why did this happen? Was it to wake me from my depression? Is it the pain of losing my city, destroyed forever? Can a person lose all the places of their memory in less than two years? Does a small death today forgive the greater death that roars in my head? How does a mother feel when she holds her child’s killed body in her hands? How does she say goodbye? How could time ever be enough? The thought that unleashes the tears is pity for that innocence killed so savagely.
When I covered previous wars in Gaza through my journalism, I saw bereaved mothers and the bodies of children and grandmothers killed. Life had only just frozen in those pink bodies that seemed alive from their stillness, so much so you wouldn’t think they were dead. Yet I never felt a pain of my own as I do now. As if it had always existed, ever since the first bullet I heard, the first tear gas grenade I smelled in the 1987 Intifada, and the rocket that shook my house in the 2008 war; all of it surfacing now.
I wondered: what will happen to me afterward? Will I pick up the pen again after abandoning it for seven months—losing faith that words can stop a war—or will I continue letting go of more things, of all social and journalistic commitments, keeping only my cats and my small family? They are my last fortress so I don’t lose myself too in this season of losses. And maybe I have already been lost.
The cat’s owner—her “mother,” as they say here—returned heavy with sorrow, confused about what she would tell her son when he comes back from vacation soon. I had no words to console her. I didn’t ask where or how they buried her. I went back to my apartment, still seeing her ghost slip in from the balcony, circling the rooms looking for food and for her favorite among my cats, Mango. She never meowed except when I held her, protesting against being carried by strangers.
I look up at the sky and see, at the same time, thousands of other ghosts around me. They could have lived, could have had lives, homes, and a city. But they were bombed with the most advanced weapons, their city bombed as if it were empty of people.
Peace be upon you, Gaza. Everything around me in exile takes me back to your eternal holocaust, to what the human being has been reduced to: a smear of blood and bones.
