I saw my grandmother, just before I woke up this morning, running as usual between the hill and the valley, exchanging morning greetings with her acquaintances in the alleyways.
She would send her greetings to the walls of the Shalabi house, even if no one was there. When I woke up, a crow was cawing above the roof of my house in Nicosia.
I feared something bad had happened to my grandmother, the one who donated the entire price of her land to the heroes of Algeria, the only person with whom I shared the ability to read each other's innermost thoughts. I rushed to write her a letter of love, gratitude, and longing, in which I poured out, in brief, the essence of humanity in the agonizing loss and the joyful reunion...
"Ah, my grandmother! How your embrace was the reason I became a person who yearns for joy but cannot find it, a person who weeps for a world where everything is measured except justice. My grandmother! I beg you, by your one remaining eye, to accept from me my heart, which I send within the folds of this letter, so that it may find rest between the breasts that nursed my mother, only to wither prematurely in our parched fields..."
My mother told me that my grandmother was circulating my letter through the alleys of the hill so that everyone would read my letter to her, which she had sealed with her tears.
"Look, my sister, what Zuhair wrote to me!" Only a few could read the letter. After my grandmother filled it with her tears, leaving only one eye without a tear...
My grandmother died a few days after my letter, as if she were sealing her life with a love letter she considered the most important letter in the world. I called my mother and asked her to be the custodian of my inheritance from my grandmother.
"Do you want an inheritance from your grandmother, Zuhair?"
"My inheritance, Mama, is my letter to her, written with tears. Keep it safe."
No one found my letter to my grandmother.
I asked her about the letter, but she didn't answer.
"Grandmother! For the first time, you don't answer my heart's call!" I haven't heard my grandmother's voice as I've always known it, from the time she cared for me when I was a first-grade student until now, when I was a diplomat representing my country abroad. Her neighbor's daughter said:
"When she showed me that letter to read, she refused to let me hold it. It was dearer to her than her own life, and it always held a special place in her heart."
*** My grandmother passed away, and no one ever knew where that letter was. I once spoke with some old women from the hill My grandmother's friends were there, and one of them replied:
- "No one knows where that letter is, because she certainly placed it, like all the departed women of the hill, inside her heart, not on top of it. No one can find it unless the heart itself perishes..."
- "Grandmother! Will you allow me to open your grave? My treasure is a letter sealed by your remaining eye with your tears, Grandmother..."
- "I listened with my heart and heard her say:
- "We, the departed, Zuhair, are allowed only one sentence to send you. So if you are searching for your letter, know that all of humanity must search for the letters their loved ones carried in their hearts at the time of their departure. Therefore, Zuhair, you must open all graves to learn what you have not yet learned, which is this great secret... the letters of love..."
- Zuhair Al-Shalabi
- Nicosia 5/3/2023