An extract from The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon

I had gone home to our house in Ajami about an hour earlier to catch the sunset in Jaffa. I go twice a week, usually two hours before sunset, and wait until we are all sleepy before heading back to my apartment in Tel Aviv. Tata had moved in with my parents six months earlier. Mother insisted after having found her unconscious in her bathroom, her leg almost broken. 

Tata’s house on al-Count Street was just a ten-minute walk away. “Al-Count” is the old name Tata still insisted on using. I had put “Sha‘are Nikanor” on the mailbox. What am I saying? She didn’t “insist” on using that name. That was its name. Al-Count sounded strange to me when I was a child. But later Tata told me that it was the honorific given by the Vatican to Talmas, the Palestinian man who donated money to build the Maronite church in Jaffa. He had lived on this street and it took his name. 

After she moved to live with my parents, Tata insisted on going back every morning to water and tend to her roses. Mother would accompany her and, just before sunset, she or my father would bring Tata back home. That morning Tata said she felt a bit tired and she didn’t go. She went out alone, which was unusual, an hour after Mother did. That’s what my father said when I got home. When my mother came back after visiting a friend and buying a few things she was terrified. 

The day squandered its minutes before my eyes. I was tired of following my mother, so I left her and hurried to al-Sa‘a Square, which Tata loved. We called her Tata, not sitti. She didn’t like sitti. 

But then I stopped. She won’t be there. There was no place to sit and look at Jaffa there. I figured that she must’ve gone to the shore, the one near the old city. She loved that spot too. So I hurried toward the sea, to the hill where she liked to sit. To get there quickly, I had to go through the artists’ alleyways in the old city. I hated walking through them. 

Will I find her? Will I find Tata? I felt my heart choking. 

I heard my breath stumbling as I went through the narrow alleyways between the dollhouses. That’s what I used to call the artists’ galleries there. I felt a sudden pain in my chest as I ran up the old steps. As if my lungs had become narrow, just like those alleyways. When I used to pass through old streets as a child I would see my shadow walking beside other shadows. Sometimes my shadow would leave me, as if it had become someone else’s. I thought I was crazy and kept this a secret for years. Once I was with Tata and I asked her to take another route that doesn’t go through the old city. She laughed, kissed my head, and held my hand. “Don’t be scared, habibi. All the Jaffans who stayed here see a shadow walking next to them when they walk through the old city. Even the Jews say they hear voices at night, but when they go out to see who it is, they don’t find anyone.” 

Her story didn’t help me shake off my fear, which overwhelmed and continued to haunt me even as I got older. I reached the open square overlooking the sea. The sea surprises me every time I come here after escaping the jaws of the old city’s alleyways. I felt a dry wind touching my lips as though I were in a desert. The sea is before me, yet it feels like a desert. I looked north beyond Jaffa. The glass windows of the other city, the white city, the city of glass, shot their reflections back at me. 

I headed to the hill next to Mar Butrus Church. I felt the church, too, was tired. 

I found her. 

She was sitting on the wooden bench, looking at the sea. I called out, happiness lilting my voice as I ran toward her: “Tata! Tata! Tata!” I looked at her tan face gazing at the sea.