My mother put on mismatched shoes and ran out of the house. Her curly hair was tied back with a black band. The edge of her white shirt hung over her gray skirt. Fear inhabited her face, making her blue eyes seem bigger. She looked crazed as she roamed the streets of Ajami, searching for my grandmother. Rushing, as if trying to catch up with herself. I followed her out. When she heard my footsteps, she looked back and gestured with her broomstick-thin arm: go back! 

“Stay home, maybe she’ll come back.” 

“But Baba is there.” 

“Then go to her house, and then to al-Sa‘a Square. Look for her there.” 

She went frantically from house to house. So tense, she looked like a lost ant. Knocking on doors so hard I was afraid she’d break her hand. As if her fist was not flesh and bones, but a hammer. She didn’t greet whoever came out, just asked right away if they’d seen my grandmother. If no one answered, she’d take a deep breath and weep before the closed door. Then she’d go on to the next house, wiping her tears away with her sleeves. 

I followed her like a child. I’d forgotten how fast her pace was. I was forty and had retained only faint and distant memories from that childhood. I was afraid she’d get hurt. I’d never seen her so overtaken by fear. She looked back every now and then, perplexed that I insisted on following her. I stayed a few steps behind. I felt too weak to challenge this woman. My mother. I begged her to go home and told her I’d search Ajami, house by house, to find Tata. She gestured again with her arm, as if I were a fly in her way. She kept searching and the houses spat her out, one by one. 

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. 

A strand of black hair had managed to slip away from her headscarf to dance with the wind. A light smile perched on her lips. I sat next to her and held her hand. “You scared us to death!” Her fingers were wooden, dry, even though to me at least her body didn’t feel cold. When I shook her shoulder, she leaned a bit. I held on to her shoulder again with my shaking fingers. Had she fainted? I placed my ear to her chest to see if she was breathing. I felt suffocated, as if all of Jaffa was caged inside me. I took out my cell phone to call for an ambulance. I could barely force words out of my dry mouth. All that water around me, yet my mouth was still so dry. 

She was sitting on the old wooden bench gazing at the sea. Surrounded by the noise of the children playing nearby. “Children are the birds of paradise,” she used to say. Mother would shoot back, “God save us from such birds. They’re all noise and no fun. Oh God, will there be noise in paradise too?” None of the passersby had noticed she was dead. She died just how she’d wanted: either in her bed, or by the sea. She used to pray that she’d never get so old to need anyone’s help. “Please, God, don’t let me be dependent on anyone. Take me to you while I am still strong and healthy.” I inched closer and hugged her. Perhaps she was the one hugging me at that moment. I knew it would be our last moment alone, before the ambulance came. I could smell jasmine, her favorite scent. She surrounded herself with tiny bottles of it, everywhere in her house. I didn’t shed any tears. Perhaps I had yet to comprehend what had happened. Or maybe I didn’t want to believe that she had died. For me the only meaning “died” had at that moment was a strange and overwhelming sense of emptiness. I called my father. He said Mother was back at home and on the verge of madness. They were going to follow me to the hospital. 

She had taken a bath before going out. As if going to her own funeral.