Maryah Converse

Seeking Citrus

Shafiq knew there would be shooting. There was always shooting. And he knew he would probably come home empty-handed. Again. It didn’t change why he had to go.

His feet hurt, blistered where the strap of his sandal snapped on yesterday’s trek, battered by rubble poking into his thick calluses through too-thin soles of what were meant to be indoor shoes. Most of all, sore to the bone from all the hours he’d been on his feet today, and yesterday, and every day of the last three weeks since they’d come south again. But the pain in his feet was no worse than the persistent ache in his belly.

A few days ago, his sister had found a handful of khubeyza, scraggly weeds growing out of the corner of a collapsed building, and Mama had shredded it finely and boiled it in lots of salty seawater, a thin broth that almost felt like food but was mostly brine. Yesterday the khubeyza broth was gone; all Mama had left to boil for them was a couple sugar packets and a chamomile teabag she’d been saving for medicinal purposes since they’d left the rubble of their twice-bombed home.

The first time they had left their home in Nazla, they’d driven away in Baba’s car – five children squeezed in the back seat, the baby on Mama’s lap, each with a bag of essentials in the trunk, all the canned goods and pasta from their cupboards on the floorboards under the kids’ feet. Shafiq held in his lap a heavy bag of oranges, lemons and clementines, the first fruits of a harvest from their walled back garden.

Since he was a little boy, he had soaked up every piece of knowledge he could find about caring for citrus, growing a private orchard that was the envy of their neighbors, because he knew what the family tradition of nurturing citrus trees meant to his mother. Her favorite grandmother Teita’s farm up north in Sawafir had produced bountiful citrus harvests year after year for generations, selling Jaffa oranges and green and yellow lemons as far away as Jerusalem, and exporting from the port of Gaza to even farther afield. As they were driving away, Mama had strung the Nazla house’s key around her neck, next to the skeleton key to her Teita’s stone house in Sawafir that almost certainly hadn’t existed for decades. Shafiq craned his neck to watch out the rear window until the last crown of the last citrus tree disappeared from view.

Mama’s brother had a copy of the Nazla housekey, and a few days later, khaaloh Tawfiq and two other uncles had moved their families out of their apartments in the besieged, cramped warren of Jabaliya Camp, into the three bedrooms of Mama and Baba’s house. When the phones worked, they sometimes heard from the uncles in Nazla, and khaaloh Tawfiq had made a point of praising Shafiq’s luscious oranges and clementines.

By the time the first ceasefire came, Baba’s car had been crushed under a falling minaret, but they found someone going north to look for his mother in Beit Lahya; he had seats free for Baba and Mama and the baby in the cab, and let the kids ride in the back of his pickup truck. They still had their little bags of essentials, but there remained only a handful of canned vegetables and a couple kilos of rice. These things were becoming expensive, with fewer and fewer aid trucks coming through the only two open border crossings that remained.

Shafiq had heard weeks ago that the house had been hit – fortunately, none of his cousins had been in the bedroom that had taken the most damage. That didn’t prepare him for the look of a corner of the house and garden wall turned to rubble, the posters on his sister’s wall now visible from the street. In six months of war, Shafiq had seen thousands of bombed out buildings as they’d moved from shared apartment to school-turned-shelter to abandoned half a house, but this time it was personal, his sister’s curtains, the bismullah cut short that his mother had painted cerulean blue high on the external wall for protection. This destruction unsettled his stomach in a new, more disconcerting way, made his fingers tremble.

But he didn’t cry until he came around the back of the house and saw the second crater. Smaller than the blast out front, it had ripped through three of his most mature citrus trees – two oranges and a green lemon – and a section of the garden wall where for several years he’d been training grapes on a trellis. The trees listed at hard angles away from each other, torn limbs leaving gaping wounds in the trunks, roots protruding towards the sky.

They knew the peace would be incomplete and brief, and Shafiq knew he might not have long with his trees. He begged Baba and his uncles for every minute of internet they would give him on their phones to research citrus propagation. Deciding that cuttings would be the most mobile, he scoured the streets and rubble all around the neighborhood for discarded water bottles and juice boxes, and painstakingly sawed the tops off with a sharp rock. Shafiq scoured the limbs of the undamaged trees for the healthiest twigs with several bright, pale green leaf nodes, and convinced his mother to let him use one of the kitchen knives they would inevitably have to leave behind, in order to sever his cuttings as cleanly as possible.

It wasn’t advisable to use garden soil that might carry diseases, but that was all Shafiq had. He did his best to mix the cleanest-looking dirt collected farthest from the blast sites with plenty of pebbles to resemble a pumice mix. There was no hope of finding rooting hormones, so he prayed over his cuttings instead. Prayed, bismullah, that they would root, would remain healthy long enough to be replanted, would grow tall and strong and produce citrus for his Mama again, inshallah. He settled the cuttings together in the bottom half of an empty olive oil tin, tied plastic over the top, and set it in a sunny spot.

When they were forced southward again, Shafiq bored holes in the oil tin so he could tie on a shredded T-shirt handle and haul his seedlings along through displacement after displacement until, one day while Mama and the little kids were waiting at the soup kitchen and Shafiq was searching for water for his seedlings, a bomb struck the half of a ruined house they’d been staying in. A wall collapsed on his seedlings, and his napping Baba and elder brother, too; none survived.

Shafiq was man of the house now, provider for Mama, three little sisters and the baby.

After the second ceasefire showed signs of lasting, when families began moving north again, Shafiq’s family went with them, on foot this time, their bags much lighter now, and their bellies, too. He dreamed of his orange and lemon and clementine trees every night. Sometimes they beckoned him onward, or sang him the lullabies his Mama had sung to all her babies. Sometimes the citrus trees burned in a whirling inferno, and Shafiq woke choking on a scream he didn’t want his Mama to hear.

But when they finally made it back to their small rhomboid of land, there was no house, no trees. Little remained but splintered wood and shattered cinderblocks half-buried between hardened bulldozer tracks in the mud. No home, no trees, no seedlings, no brother, no Baba.

Even so, they were back on their land, and this time they were determined to stay as long as they could. Most of the concrete pad that had been their patio remained, and a small piece of wall. They were able to scavenge some rebar and scraps of wood to frame a shelter, and a patchwork of feed bags and blankets and tarps, even some corrugated metal, enough for two walls and a roof. It didn’t help with the cold, but kept some of the rain off. Mama told the girls they were nomads like their father’s Bedouin grandfather, finding life in the desert wherever they could, like the original Arabs.

Most days Mama sent the girls on a long “Arab trek” with dented soup pots to wait in line at the soup kitchen, and most days they returned with a thin soup of lentils and vegetables, very occasionally with a few rounds of bread. When they returned empty-handed, Mama knew where khubeyza and other edible weeds were beginning to emerge between the occupier’s bulldozer tracks.

Then the bombs came again, and the total blockade. They’d been hungry for months, but now even the soup kitchens were shutting down. There was no food but weeds, no food but what scraps the occupiers were doling out at gunpoint.

To even have a chance of these small handouts, they had to leave their land and return south again, walking three days with tens of thousands of others – mothers with children in hand, grandmothers held upright by grandsons, brothers carrying amputees on their backs, orphans with their found families. They trudged over and around the mounds and shattered shells of restaurants, mosques, apartment buildings, clinics and offices. They slept where they could find shelter amid the ruins, and started again in the morning.

Fellow travelers tried to share what scraps of food were available, what water could be boiled, but the girls were getting weaker and weaker. They had long learned not to complain of their pinched stomachs and parched lips, but the baby was inconsolable. He should be taking his first unsteady steps, but was still as small and weak as a baby half his age. Mama always let the girls eat first, and didn’t get enough for herself to keep her milk flowing, but the hospitals and clinics they passed were running out of formula, and the baby needed more than thin khubeyza broth.

When they finally arrived back in the south, within a couple hours’ walk of one of the two new aid distribution sites, they found shelter in the remaining corner of a bombed-out apartment’s sitting room, but at least it offered a sliver of roof in the rain.

Only Shafiq remained to fetch food for his family.

So, he ignored the pain in his feet, his legs, his belly, his knotted shoulders, and trudged onward in the thin pre-dawn light. These new distribution centers ran out of supplies even faster than most, and it wasn’t a short walk, so he tried to get moving as early as he could. With the sun just inches above the horizon, the high chain-link fence topped in barbed wire came into view, the narrow cattle chutes they all squeezed into while they waited.

He was early enough to be near the front, but the more people squeezed in behind him, the more uneasily he watched the occupation soldiers with their rifles angled down. Someone stumbled against the fence, rattled the chain-link, and the rifles jerked up. Shafiq suddenly felt an itch between his eyes, as if someone were staring at him through their crosshairs.

A shot rang out, and then another. The air was shrill with screaming as Shafiq was buffeted from all sides from frantically jostling bodies, but there was nowhere to go, no escape. When a steady barrage of gunfire followed, Shafiq dropped down, knees close to his chest, arms curled over his head. Was this how it was written that he would die?

Shafiq tightened his arms over his ears, trying to drown out the sounds of terror and pain, and closed his eyes. The faces of his family flashed through his mind, and his father and brother in their burial shrouds. He saw his mother’s beloved citrus trees: tangerines, Jaffa oranges, green and yellow lemons. He pictured each careful step of selecting and preparing his cuttings. He imagined their final planting behind a new family home, settling his seedlings in the ground in a peaceful hillside meadow, patting the soil down around them, surrounding each with a low dirt berm, then pouring water around each from a clay pitcher that never grew empty.

If this was Shafiq’s time, let him die dreaming of what he loved.

END

Now a 2025 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellow in Jordan, Maryah Converse was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Jordan (2004-2006), an English teacher in Jordan (2008-2010), and a student in Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Her publications include New Madrid Journal, Silk Road Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, L’Éphémère Review, and more. She holds a Masters in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and is a PhD candidate in Arabic applied linguistics.