There’s a street in my neighborhood whose name translates as Forest of Winds. That’s because when there’s a storm, you can hear the wind howl as it sweeps through the narrow valley, taking with it leaves and tiles and clothes hung up to dry. When I was little—so little that Baba could still carry me on his shoulders—the howling scared me, and I used to hide in a cupboard in the kitchen, or press his hands until his knuckles turned white. Now I am not scared anymore, but my younger sister is, so to comfort her I invented a game: the howling comes from a majestic lioness, with sharp claws and fierce teeth but gentle dark eyes, who protects us and our neighbors from harm.
We found Silwan the Lion on this street. He was a fluffy black kitten, and he sat abandoned between heaps of garbage in the midday sun. My siblings and I were walking home from school, our backpacks heavy with books and the smell of benzine burning in our noses. My sister spotted him first. “Look!” she said, pointing her index finger to the side of the road. I didn’t see anything at first, and only when I took a few steps in her direction did I make out a small bundle of fur cowered behind an empty bottle of Sprite and a bag of chips, whose contents had partially spilled on the floor. At first, I didn’t think much of it—after all, there are many stray cats in my neighborhood. During the day, they hide under cars and sleep, and in the evenings, they jump out of garbage containers when Baba takes out the trash. Mama feels sorry for them, so she often leaves out scraps of meat and rice—leftovers from our dinner—on a small plate for them to feed on. When I looked again, my heart beat faster with excitement. I had never seen a cat like Silwan: long-haired with clear green eyes that stare directly at you. Even though he was still really small, and his fur was matted, there was something regal about him.
My older brother is the stormiest of us, and he ran towards the cat, his arms outstretched. Silwan hissed at him, arching his back. I motioned for my brother to step aside. “You are scaring him,” I said, “you have to be patient.” I took out my half-eaten tuna sandwich from lunch and broke off a piece. I placed it in the palm of my hand, stepped forward, and crouched down slowly. Silwan wrinkled his nose. After a moment’s hesitation, he stumbled towards me—his gait was still wobbly and uncoordinated—and picked up the piece of food. “I am taking him home,” I proclaimed, lifted him to my chest, and carried him off with long strides, tightly wrapped in my arms. He was warm against my skin, and light as the little chickens my grandmother raises in a shed in her garden.
We named the kitten Silwan, which means solace, or consolation. It is also the name of our neighborhood, which is beautiful and ancient, a place of miracles. Mama said that in biblical times, Silwan was supposedly the location of a pool whose water the faithful bathed in before praying at the temple. Last year, the authorities uprooted a large olive grove in the neighborhood to look for the ruins of the pool, to no avail. Mama and Baba joined the elders of the village to protest, and after they returned home that day, they ended up talking late into the night, long after they put me and my siblings to bed. I could sense their worry and couldn’t fall asleep, so I heard their muffled voices from the living room, a ray of light from the corridor visible through the crack in the door.
When we found Silwan, we were so happy. He made us forget our worries for the moment. We washed him and bought him proper cat food, and with Mama’s help we made him a collar out of an old leather belt.
“Now he’s the color of our flag,” Baba said with a smile. “Black fur and green eyes and a red collar. We’re just missing the white.”
“That will come,” Mama said, “when he is a grandcat, with dozens of grandkittens and a long white beard, telling stories of his adventures.”
My siblings and I giggled. Silwan was gentle and playful, and watching him filled us with lightness and pride. We tied the feather of a sunbird, which my brother had picked up during a hike in the hills, to an old wooden fishing rod whose top part had broken off. Silwan loved chasing the feather across the kitchen and the living room up the stairs, making us stumble as we tried to avoid his path.
There’s a house in my neighborhood, not far from ours, where a girl was shot. The men in this house have guns, and police escort their families whenever they walk the streets. They think they need protection from us, even the children, even though we don’t have guns or security. One evening the people in the house were having a celebration. The girl was standing outside, maybe trying to see what was going on, and a bullet hit her in the neck. “That was targeted,” Baba said, “from that range you cannot unintentionally hit someone. Shot to kill.” The people of the house walk upright, not like people who fear. My siblings and I dream of revenge. Sometimes we throw stones at the windows of the house, or at the people when we see them in the street. Then the police yell and try to chase us, and we run away. Mama scolds us for throwing the stones. She is opposed to violence, but more than that she is afraid that we will get arrested. “Don’t be scared,” I told her after we found Silwan, “from now on he will protect us.” My siblings and I decided that Silwan was the son of the mighty lioness whose howl echoes across the Forest of Winds. Why else was he, unlike us, not afraid of wind and rain and lightning?
The face of the girl who was shot is painted on the wall of a house in the Forest of Winds. There are many paintings and murals in my neighborhood, commemorating those we have lost. The girl’s eyes are a light brown, like the caramel candy we eat after each meal during the month of fasting, with a tinge of blue around the irises. Her hair is dark and curly, and her lips are pressed together, with the corners of her mouth bent slightly upwards, indicating a faint smile. She hovers above a lush green meadow with dandelions and poppies and purple butterflies. She looks strangely out of place, like a ten-year-old who appears at the gates of Heaven much too early so that even the angels have mercy on her and try to send her back to the living, but an invisible force keeps her from returning, so she hangs suspended in limbo, until the coming of Judgment Day. There are no meadows in our neighborhood, but I imagine that this is the kind of meadow you can find in other places where there’s mountains instead of desert, and there’s no drought, so rivers flow in abundance. I often told Baba that when I was older, Silwan and I would travel the world, and as if to demonstrate the seriousness of my intentions, I put him in my backpack and carried him around the house. Then Baba would smile and give me a big hug.
“My daughter, my little traveler,” he would whisper in my ear, the stubbles of his beard rubbing against my neck.
“You and Mama will come with me, right?” I once asked him.
Baba raised his eyebrows, then slowly shook his head. “It is important for you to see the world, my dear, but Mama and I will stay here. I will only leave this neighborhood to go on pilgrimage or when I die.”
There are dust storms in my neighborhood, especially in spring and early summer, when the hot desert winds whirl up sand from the Bariyah and travel west, enveloping the city in ghostly twilight. In geography, we learned about polar night, and when there’s a storm, I imagine that I am at the far ends of the earth where the sun never rises, and the days pass in eternal darkness.
During a sandstorm this spring, my brother and I were back in the Forest of Winds, and the dead girl’s eyes were watching us. The street is narrow, like the intestines of an animal, and the walls of other houses are painted in bright colors, as if to distract from the feeling of tightness that might befall you if you’ve never been here before. Silwan was walking by my feet—“like a dog,” Mama used to say—his tail upright and ears moving with the sounds of the neighborhood. Occasionally he stopped to smell a piece of trash, the corner of a building, or the wheels of a car. I like to think, I hope, I used to pray that in these moments he was happy. My brother told me about a test he’d been studying for, complaining about the teacher, who is strict and whose assignments he struggled with. We were about halfway through the Forest, blinded by the semidarkness, when we saw them: two boys, accompanied by a police officer, wearing the prayer strings of the righteous. Their grey silhouettes were almost ghost-like against the orange dusk of sand and twilight. My brother didn’t pass up an opportunity to vent his rage. Insults and stones and an empty can were hurled in the direction of the righteous, whose facial expression changed from surprise to anger. They screamed something at the police officer in their language, words I didn’t understand, except that they sounded hostile. The police officer was dressed in a grey uniform, and her dark blond hair was held in a long ponytail. Something about her clothes and her whole demeanor reminded me of an adult in a costume, like at my sister’s birthday party last year. She screamed back at us and put her hand on her weapon. The cold metallic gleam betrayed that the gun was not a toy. I threw my arms across my brother and pushed him to the side, certain that he would get shot, like the girl outside the house during the celebration. I could already picture him stuck between Heaven and Earth in the Forest of Winds, joining the howl of the lioness like a chorus of the damned. I instinctively closed my eyes because if I had to die, I didn’t want to know. I waited for the deafening echo of gunshots, which every child in my neighborhood knows, and for cold metal to tear through my flesh.
When I opened my eyes again after a few seconds, which felt like a very long time, I could see that the righteous had continued their march into the twilight. I could still hear their shouts reverberate through the narrow valley, growing distant and fainter with each step. My brother angrily pushed my arms aside.
“What was that for?” he asked, his voice full of reproach.
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I didn’t mean it. Mama is right—I am a terrible liar. I took a deep breath and inhaled the cool evening air. Through the dust and semidarkness, I could make out the sun setting across the horizon, red like the blood that still flowed through my veins. We were alive. I called Silwan, who emerged from behind a garbage container and rubbed against my legs, his usual greeting. This is the last thing that I remember clearly: the feeling of exaltation, and the softness of Silwan’s fur against my skin. My memory of everything that comes after is filtered through haze. There was a white car that appeared out of nowhere. We were distracted, suddenly overcome with exhaustion. We just wanted to go home. Unbeknownst to us, Silwan had galloped ahead. Perhaps he was chasing a butterfly or a bird. The driver was not going very fast—after all, the street is narrow—but fast enough to hit Silwan. In the end, he left us without having ever left the neighborhood.
When we returned to the Forest of Winds, Baba once more carried me on his shoulders, even though I know that I am no longer a little girl and much too heavy. He stopped a few times to catch his breath and hold his back from the exertion. Silwan’s body still lay in the same spot where the car had hit him, black and fluffy against the asphalt. It almost looked as if he were sleeping, protected by the invisible gaze of the mighty lioness. Attracted by the heat, three flies were circling his eyes and nose. His left paw was curled up, slightly resembling a human fist, and I wondered if he had been in pain. Baba quickly wrapped Silwan in white cloth—I think he wanted to spare me the sight—but I could make out dried blood leaving a dark stain on the cloth, like mint tea spilled on the carpet in our living room. We cleaned him with water from our tap and for a moment, I wished that the authorities had succeeded in locating the ancient pool. It would have given me comfort to know that Silwan had been purified with water destined for the temple. Christians believe that water from the pool healed a man born blind, so perhaps it could raise Silwan from the dead. Mama says that there’s a competition of Gods in our neighborhood.
After Silwan died, I prayed a lot, until I decided not to pray anymore because I was told that Silwan cannot go to Heaven. Now when there’s a storm, I hide in my bed, so Mama and Baba don’t see me cry. My siblings sob and wail, and I cover my ears, because I don’t want to hear. With delicate strokes, Mama painted Silwan on the front door of our house. His eyes are bright green, and he wears his red collar. He looks just like I remember him, except that he has a few strands of white in his fur.
