Mornings in Jenin (28 page)
Ari paused. Inhaled the stinging memory before exhaling it in words, as David’s trembling hands reached into his satchel for the drink he kept close at all times.
“But before I could get out of the cart, we were moving again. And I sank into such shame for having thought what I did.”
Ari faced me squarely, in a facing-up way, his eyes stretched large behind his thick glasses, and continued. “For the rest of the journey I trembled in my mistake, my private betrayal of the friend risking his life to save mine. My betrayal before being betrayed.
“I don’t remember the next hours, or if they were minutes. But soon Hasan stopped and showed us a crawling path to the other side, handing me the flag that he had painstakingly painted himself with the Jewish star, the same blue star that fluttered over the demise of his country.
“He put his arms around me. ‘May we meet again, brother,’ were the last words I heard him say. ‘Forgive me,’ I replied, and crawled on my way with my parents.”
Ari paused, as if to say
That’s it
. In the hollow of that cavernous pause, I was a child in Baba’s arms asking about Ari Perlstein and watching the sad silence of Baba’s hands close the book, closing that particular dawn with it.
No.
That’s not it
.
“After having lost his home, his land, his son, his identity to the Jewish state, your father risked his life to save mine and my family’s.”
That was it.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Jacob’s face repositioned in relief, as he measured the acceptability of his Arab relatives by their deeds toward Jews. I found the boy irritating, though Sara seemed to take a sincere liking to him.
We were tired when we left Ari. I was tired of the story. Tired of the past.
On the ride to Natanya, I asked David to take a slight detour. “It’s a wee bit out of our way,” I said in an Irish accent, imitating Jack O’Malley, who had said those exact words to me when he had taken me to the orphanage so long ago. No one understood the significance of the accent and I did not bother explaining.
Later, I will tell Sara all about O’Malley, the orphanage, the Colombian Sisters, and Haydar, the headmistress. Huda and I will tell her about the Warda house behind the third olive tree past the twin cedars on the path to Taybeh and we will sleep a night on the rooftop with our children as we did in our girlhood
. I felt giddy and sure. The land seemed to welcome my return.
Despite the turmoil, it felt right to be there. I could feel meaning coming back into that word that had been drained of hope and left as dumbfounded letters. I was Amal there, not Amy. “I like hearing people call you Amal, Mom,” Sara said to me when we were in Jenin the following day.
And in Khilwa, the detour “a wee bit out of our way,” where a biblical stone wall parted like a curtain on the Mount of Olives, I stood on fabled ground overlooking Jerusalem, just as I did with Jack O’Malley the day I said good-bye to Jenin. Now I was going back to Jenin. Time was looping backward.
Now that ancient village with walls made of secrets and trees planted in blood looked inanimate. Around Jerusalem and in the West Bank, settlements on every hilltop—with their manicured green lawns and red roofs metastasizing into the valleys like an earth rash—contrasted cruelly with the crumbling Arab homes below, where sewage from these settlements drained and where settlers often dumped their garbage.
Tall, much too tall, buildings towered over the city. Apartment buildings for Jews only, fortified settlements, angular hotels, and imported shrubbery watched like prison guards over the native arched windows and doors of masonic buildings, the arches from which the word “architecture” derives.
But regardless of the frantic “Judaising of Jerusalem,” the Old City seemed cold. Cruel, even. And, eventually, undeserving.
How could this have happened?
“Wow!” Sara said. “It’s beautiful.”
No it isn’t
, I wanted to say.
It’s only stone
.
Why do dignity and honor hinge on stone and soil? Generation upon generation disembowel the earth, building monuments from her entrails to mark their time, to mold the dream of some relevance in an immense universe, to manufacture a significance from utter randomness, to attain immortality by seizing, stamping, gouging an immortal earth.
“It is only stone, Sara.” My thoughts escaped.
“Stones that represent history, Mom,” she said, turning to me in disbelief that I would belittle what seemed so grand. “It’s magnificent.”
“I’ll show you an olive tree in Jenin—Old Lady, she’s called— that has more history than the Old City walls. It’s more beautiful, humble, and authentic than the chiseled stone here,” I said, believing my words only as they emerged. “And,” I continued, wounded by love for this perfect creature born of my body, “it is you who is magnificent.”
2002
JENIN HAD BEEN IN THE NEWS LATELY: “DEN OF TERROR.” “NESTING GROUND OF TERRORISTS.” “TERRORISM BREEDING GROUND.”
It was a taller Jenin than the one I had left nearly thirty years earlier.
Shack built over shack. Stone instead of adobe. “Vertical growth” is the technical term. One square mile of United Nations subsidies where forty-five thousand residents, four generations of refugees, lived, vertically packed.
The air was busy when I arrived. Everything seemed to move and scurry. Even children played nervously. There were no old men sitting on upturned buckets in lazy games of backgammon, a constant scene from my youth here. Young men, washed clean of dreams, ran in the alleyways with rifles strapped to their bodies. They were preparing for the inevitable, stocking up on food, setting up defenses, booby traps, and sandbags against the coming storm. Anger and defiance had their arms linked, marching in a military left, left-right-left step with no place to go but the boundaries of that one-square-mile patch of a taller refugee camp. Suicide bombers locking their belts, lovers locking their arms, little girls locking their knees, and mothers packing their children into the innermost, lowermost rooms.
It was March 31, 2002.
On March 20, a suicide bomber had killed seven Israelis in the Galilee, which was in retaliation for Israel’s killing of thirty-one Palestinians on March 12, which was in retaliation for the killing of eleven Israelis on March 11, which was in retaliation for Israel’s killing of forty Palestinians on March 8, and on and on.
While we were revisiting the past in Ari’s office, Israeli tanks were hammering at Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters in the present. And while Yasser Arafat was holed up in a room inside the rubble of his former headquarters, where the view outside his window was of the barrel of an Israeli tank, Mr. President George W. Bush announced that Arafat ought to “stop the terror.”
Later at David’s house, Sara asked her uncle to silence the television broadcasting “that enormous ego with such a little brain to go with,” as she put it.“ You would think the logistics of ‘stopping terror,’ i.e., an intact building and a police force, might occur to the president of the United States. But nooo. Not our Dubya. He says ‘terror’ so much I’m beginning to think it’s a medical condition. Some kind of incurable verbal tic. Terrorterrorterrorterrorterror!” she said in overwrought frustration.
My daughter.
The next day, we were entering the much-taller-than-before Jenin. The much more crowded Jenin. The busy, resolute, angry Jenin. Not the passive, waiting, putting-it-in-the-hands-of-Allah Jenin of my youth. My daughter and I held hands as we walked up the snaking alleyways, the sun trembling on sewage rivulets. Music, playing inside homes, spilled onto our path and I heard Fayruz, her voice climbing like freedom toward and into the sky.
For your sake, oh city of prayer, I pray.
Ya bahiyat el masakin. Oh rose of all cities.
Our eyes travel to you each day . . . to ease the pain of your churches and to wipe the sadness from your mosques . . .
I stopped, spread my arms to my sides to touch both walls of the alley, and ran my palms along the stone of those taller, closer-together homes. “This is how Huda and I always walked through these corridors,” I said to my daughter.
“You have no idea how moving it is for me to be here, where you grew up. I can’t wait to meet Huda and hear stories of you two.” Sara was visibly excited.
Another song now. This one reached into the heart, first with the wail of its nye, then with its words.
Unadeekum. I’m calling your help, tugging at your hands and I kiss the ground beneath your shoes . . .
I give you the light in my eyes . . .
And I take my share of what pains you.
I have held nothing back for my country . . .
And I scoffed in the face of my oppressors, an orphan, I, bare and without shoes.
Unadeekum. I’m calling your help, holding my blood in my palm . . .
Ahead, some children giggled at two grown women running their palms on the walls as they walked. A rush of squawking chickens batted their useless wings in an attempt to flee from the small children chasing them. Some things had not changed.
The old had died, the young had aged, homes had grown taller and alleyways more narrow, babies had been born, children had gone to school and chased chickens, and the olives had twisted with fruit. Still, the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year of 1948.
A voice from my past crept behind me. “You’re in Jenin.” It made my heart explode with the memory of love. With the memory of life. “Must you always state the obvious?” I said, turning to the tiger eyes of Huda. We flung ourselves around each other, laughing through tears.
“You got fat,” she said.
“So did you,” I said.
“Must you state the obvious?” she said, imitating me.
She pulled Sara into our hug and the three of us, jolly, made our way to her home.
“It’s only me and my youngest, Mansour, in the house now,” she said, panting as we trudged up the sloping alley toward the small shack not far from the dwelling where we had spent our youth. “The Jews took Osama last month. Jamil, one of my twins, comes often to check on us, but most of the time we don’t know where he is.” She stopped, stored up a breath, and went on. “He’s with the resistance,” she said, opening the metal door of her home. “The Jews killed his twin, Jamal, when he was twelve years old. Jamil never got over his brother dying in his arms like that. Sit down, I’ll make us some tea.”
Huda’s beautiful eyes shone from a face engraved by decades of weather and by the loss of her child. In her eyes, our shared yesterdays tarried with the taller, denser Jenin of the present. The continuity of our friendship was stored in those eyes, and I searched them to find the sense of home, which I had expected to feel in Jenin but did not. Had I changed that much? How unnatural it felt to pick up strands of a past I had abandoned long ago.
“Mansooooooour!” Huda called to her youngest. Within minutes, a tall, languid young man bent his back to enter the house. He acknowledged our presence with a passing look, not rude and not polite. His arms dangled, as if they were weighed down by his hands, which were splattered and brushed with paint of all colors.
“Habibi, this is Amto Amal. She’s finally back. And this is her daughter, Sara,” she said. He shook our hands, looking through us, and he left as he had entered, in matter-of-fact silence, bending his body to clear the doorway.
“That was my baby, Mansour. He’s an artist!” Huda said, emerging from her tiny kitchen with a tray holding three glasses of hot tea and some biscuits. “But don’t be offended. Mansour doesn’t talk. He stopped speaking when he was six.”
Later that day, Sara and I watched Mansour paint a mural portrait of a recent shaheed, the one who had blown up the Jerusalem café. He moved his arms in large fluid brushstrokes along a wall that would greet the looming Israeli invasion. Soon an implacable face emerged from the paint, its larger-than-life eyes peering beneath a tightly swathed kaffiyeh into the futureless 1948, into the freedom of a defiant death exploding in a shit-pile of glory.
Though he spoke to no one and gave few more than a passing glance, Mansour was much loved in the camp. It seemed everyone knew his name. Passersby stopped to admire his work, pat him on the back, and mumble private thanks and prayers for the boy and his talent.
“He’s very talented, isn’t he?” Sara said.
But it was more than artistic ability. It was his silence. A quiet so dense and thick that it seemed to exist on the verge of materializing. He painted from the depths of its hush, and it hovered around him like an invisible force.
“It makes me angry knowing what they did to him. How they got away with it,” Sara said. Over tea, Huda had given us the abbreviated version of his kidnapping at the age of six, when he had been taken blindfolded in the back of an Israeli army jeep and returned a week later for a ransom of five hundred dollars. “Of all my children, he was always the most sensitive. The one who needed me the most,” Huda had said.
Ammo Darweesh had become a beloved patriarch in the camp. I could see that by the number of people at his home, most of whom recognized me when I stepped through his door. “Are you who I think you are?” one of my cousins exclaimed, coming to embrace me.
“Praise be to Him who brings our loved ones home from el ghurba,” another said. “Praise to Him.” And they all rose excitedly to greet me but waited respectfully for my uncle to see me first.
I made my way to Ammo Darweesh, leaning on his wheelchair to meet his outstretched arms. “Ya habibti, ya Amal.” My ammo began to cry. “You bring the winds of Hasan and Dalia into this house, darling. You bring me joy, beautiful daughter.” I kissed his hand three times, touching it to my forehead between each kiss.
My heart swelled with love and memories, more and more so as Sara and I spent the evening there. Ammo Darweesh had grown old and frail, but he was spirited during those hours with us. My cousin whispered to me, “I haven’t seen my father this happy in a long time, Amal.”
Not until our third night in Jenin, on April 2, did I learn that Haj Salem was still alive.
“We take turns taking food to him every day, just like our mothers used to. The children here do not know him the way we did. I am not sure when he stopped the storytelling. It was gradual, I think. Mostly he just chips away at wood sticks now with a small pocket knife, which we intentionally keep dull,” Huda said.
I would visit him first thing the next day.
We were in for the night. Lights all over town were out or locked inside by blackened windows. Israel had launched a bombing campaign against nearby Bethlehem, the little town of, and moved hundreds of troops to towns around Jenin.
Nestled in candlelight and sandbags, Huda and I reminisced, unpacking the burdens and delights of memory for our children and finding gems we had almost forgotten. We made Huda’s home that night into a shack of small happiness in a one-square-mile mute sea of anxiety.
Slouched against a stack of sandbags, Mansour sketched on a pad across from us, smiling occasionally. Sara’s vocabulary narrowed to three basic words, “Tell me more,” while Huda and I tossed back our shared life, tasting it now through our grown children. The Warda house, home of our one-armed doll, climbing trees, hopscotch, Yousef ’s dirty magazines, Baba’s solitude, the dawn, Mama, Haj Salem, spit-string contests, war. The latent instinct of sisterhood moved us to clasp hands, as we had done since we had awareness, and we walked hand in hand to the end of our memories. Sara lay her head in the nook of my shoulder, wrapping her arms around me, as she had not done since she was too young to remember. And while the air outside was foreboding and pulsed with coming death, I burned with the love I had denied myself and this perfect child resting in my arms. It occurred to me then that I had found home. She had always been there.
“Let’s put the night in the hands of Allah and try to get some rest. May Allah protect us and protect my boy Jamil wherever he is right now,” Huda said, and we closed our eyes where we sat, reclining on the floor cushions and on each other. Hours passed, but it seemed like we had only just closed our eyes when a volley of voices shouted throughout the darkened camp, “The Jews are coming! The Jews are coming!”
The Jews are coming.
In a moment, an exquisite creature hurriedly entered, bending his shirtless body to clear the doorway. A lantern in his hand illuminated the outlines of hard muscles beneath his brown skin. He whispered to Huda, “Yumma, are you awake? Mansour, brother, where are you?” He flicked the light switch. “It’s okay. The Jews will not be here for another hour.”
An hour.
Swollen with tears, my dearest friend wrapped her body around her son. She kissed him with frantic love, making sure that no space on his handsome face was left unkissed, no inch unloved by his mother. Huda knew that Jamil might never return after that hour. The spectacle of that good-bye moved me to grip my daughter, both of us pulling ourselves and our tears away from a moment where we had no right to be.
“Mansour, brother. If anything happens, it’s up to you to take care of Mother,” Jamil said, understanding the silent response of Mansour.
When Jamil went to leave, something extraordinary happened. It lasted for less than an eternal thirty seconds and I believe that only I witnessed it. As he turned—a black-and-white checkered headband tied behind him, communist red armbands marking two violently perfect limbs—his untamed round black eyes fell accidentally onto Sara, and a stare held them both in place. An unexpected urgency, a plea. A sudden love wanting to be. Some fantastic desire, which neither of them could afford. A familiar oasis between two strangers, calling to them both.
“Jews! Jews!” we heard, and the moment was banished by that call to find refuge in that refugee camp. Mansour turned out the lights, lit another lantern, and hugged his brother. Jamil kissed Huda on her forehead. “Allah yihmeek ya ibni,” she cried, praying for his protection.
