Tasting the Sky (7 page)

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Authors: Ibtisam Barakat

BOOK: Tasting the Sky
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The month was over and the promise was kept. Mother dressed me and Maha and combed our hair. We were ready to go. I took along drawings I had made for this day. In all of them, Basel, Muhammad, and I stood holding hands.
Right outside Dar El-Tifl's gate I found a surprise—Father! The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up as though he was going to work. But he was here to take us to Jericho. Seeing his smile erased the final traces of my sadness. Looking at the street, cars, trees, and people from inside his arms, I knew I never wanted to go back to Dar El-Tifl.
At the taxicab station for Jericho, Father bought a box of marshmallow-chocolate mounds. He offered me one, but I wanted to save them all for my brothers. Settling in the
seat of a taxi, I held the box in my lap, guarding it as I guarded my drawings.
“If you feel pressure on your eardrums, open your mouth,” the taxi driver announced.
“Jericho is eight hundred feet below sea level,” Father explained to us. “Half an hour and we will get there,” he said.
When we arrived in Jericho it did feel like a different world. Though it was only the beginning of March, the weather was so hot the car felt like a teakettle with all of us boiling and sweating inside. Touching the car's metal door stung my skin.
The boys' orphanage, called Al-Bir Society, was at the edge of the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp. Mother mentioned that Aqabat Jaber was one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps. Many of Al-Bir's orphans came from this camp. She knew because the second year she and my father were married they had lived in Aqabat Jaber. Muhammad was born in this camp, but unlike many camp residents my parents were able to move out before I was born.
“One can die of heatstroke any day in this desert,” Father said. When the taxi let us out in front of the gate, sand was everywhere.
This orphanage had walls bigger than those enclosing Dar El-Tifl. Al-Bir's walls were made to stop strangers from entering the orphanage as well as boys from running away. My father knocked at the big gate. I extended my arms out straight, holding the candy box topped with the drawings.
An older guard with a head cover opened the gate and
beckoned us in. We gave him my brothers' names. Father said he was their uncle.
The guard seemed pleased to see us. He said he was happy each time any of the boys had a visitor. He went to call my brothers, who were asleep. We had arrived during their compulsory afternoon nap time.
I anxiously waited near the guard's chair, watching every step he took as he crossed the huge, empty playground and entered a door at the center of the building. Everything seemed asleep, wilted by the heat.
I looked at the dozens of windows and doors, and wondered if Basel and Muhammad were really inside. Everything was so quiet. Then, suddenly, they appeared. They woke up the world with their shouts of surprise and excitement. And as they approached us, I ran toward them across the thirty days of waiting and wondering if I would ever see them again, across the thirty days of feeling alone without them.
 
Basel and Muhammad's heads were shaved. They had become very thin. Without waiting for questions, they began to talk about everything. They tugged at our clothes, pulled our hands, wanted us to listen with more than our ears. I gave them the marshmallow mounds, which had melted in the Jericho heat. They ate everything at once, for anything that remained would be stolen by the other boys.
Now it was time to give them my drawings, and they gazed at them with the same hunger they'd had when they ate. “This is me!” said Muhammad, pointing to a stick figure
with greenish eyes. I stood proud when everyone confirmed that the three stick figures holding hands in my drawings looked like the three of us.
My brothers, too, had brought gifts. They asked that I close my eyes and open my hands. In one hand Muhammad put a ring he said he had found on the playground the first day he and Basel were brought to Al-Bir. He'd hid it in his pocket all this time so no one would steal it. In my other hand Basel put a
ta'reefeh,
a penny, which he had gotten from somewhere.
“We knew you'd be coming to see us,” Basel said. “We've waited for you every day.”
Happiness filled my heart. I put the ring on my finger and the
ta'reefeh
in my pocket. I stood in the middle, my brothers holding my hands. It was as though we were standing in one of my drawings.
The principal said we could not take my brothers outside the school grounds. He pointed to a wooden bench at the edge of the playground and said we could sit there if we wanted to, or we could go inside. But he warned us to be quick, because some boys who never had visitors became sad, jealous, or hostile when they saw other boys with company.
Basel and Muhammad wanted us to go inside and see the world they lived in before we all sat outside to visit. They led us into the cafeteria, then into their sleeping area, with bunk beds in long rows. They pointed to sleeping boys and whispered. One boy named Roubine tried to run away from the orphanage daily. On the days he succeeded in getting outside the gate, he waited for a bus to stop, then hung
on its back rails. He changed buses, continually hanging on the back, until he reached Jerusalem. Bus drivers captured and returned him.
Basel and Muhammad had adjacent beds, but shaking their heads in horror for lack of words, they began to tell us what went on at Al-Bir. Every night, they said, some hostile boys rolled sand in paper to create what they called sand cigarettes and waited until everyone slept, then went around putting the sand cigarettes in the mouths of snoring boys. The snorers would choke and almost die. So every night, afraid to sleep alone, my brothers crawled into one bed and slept back to back. On nights when the desert temperature dropped sharply, it became impossible for them to fall asleep because of the cold. So they stayed awake and cried.
When we went outside and sat in the shade of a tree, my brothers confessed they frequently got hit, often unfairly, they assured us. They begged that we take them back with us. My parents grew silent. They seemed shattered by what they had heard, but what could they do?
Then my father spoke. “Mirriam! Let's take them out.”
“Take them out to where?” she replied.
“Our children are treated like orphans while we live,” he said, lowering his voice in order not to attract attention.
“You want us to go back to that prison on the hill?” she hissed, now weeping. “You try it—stay with four children in a tiny room all day while soldiers are shooting outside. You try it,” she pressed.
My father shook his head and cursed the world. Then he thought for a moment. “What if I build a wall in front of the
house?” he begged. “I can ask a few of my friends to help me. We can do it in no time. And it would cover the big window. The soldiers would not be able to see us from the road.”
But Mother was still not convinced.
“I can also keep the water supply replenished and connect it to a hose to reach the kitchen so you won't need to go outside for water,” he argued.
Mother still resisted.
“What if I purchase a goat for milk and chickens for eggs, and build a shed for the animals? That will make life easier for you,” he begged.
“But what if I still don't feel safe in that wretched house?” she challenged.
“I would not ask you to live there for a moment longer,” he said.
Mother finally softened. “Let us go back just for a while and see,” she bargained. “But only when the summer vacation begins.”
We left Basel and Muhammad at Al-Bir orphanage, their faces pale with disappointment. The guard reminded them to wipe away their tears so they would not look like girls. The end of the school year felt far away, like a country at the end of the world. But if I was patient and waited, I would reach it and see my brothers again. I had waited before. I would wait again.
 
On the first day of June, Father stood at Dar El-Tifl's gate holding hands with my brothers. He had picked them up earlier. We all rode back home together, Father singing
loudly as he drove. “Wait until you see your house,” he kept telling us. His voice was full of smiles. But Mother was quiet.
When we arrived we found a house different from the one we had left. A brick wall concealed the front window. It connected to the sides of the house and made an extra outside room. Grapevines spread on wire to create a roof and block the summer sun. Water now reached the kitchen through a hose with a nozzle that opened and closed with a simple twist. It also reached the plot of vegetables Father had planted in preparation for our arrival: carrots, tomatoes, parsley, zucchini, onions, eggplants, and melons. He had watered them daily. All had thrived. The watermelons were the size of gum balls. In a few weeks they would be larger than soccer balls.
Two geranium pots stood by the entrance. Mother crushed the leaves between her fingers, breathed in the fragrance, and smiled. I stuck the round red petals on my toenails so they looked like Mother's painted nails during the Eid holiday celebration.
Father had also built a shed on the left side of the house. The promised goat was inside it; we heard her bleating. We raced to the shed to look at her. She was large and had banana-shaped horns. Her eyes were the shape of peanuts, and her hair was brown with apricot-blond streaks. She was a
Shameyyah
goat, he boasted. That meant she was imported from Syria. “She can bear baby goats twice a year if fed well,” he said. The goat's belly already held a baby that would soon be born.
Father put his arm around Mother's shoulders, and
we all walked to the backyard overlooking the valley. He pointed to the stone person I had built for him before I left for Dar El-Tifl. I jumped into his arms and let him carry me.
We sat on the red earth, talking and laughing, the setting sun a bonfire before us. My father picked up tiny pebbles and flung them into the distance, just like he always used to do.
My heart knew that this was my true home. Unlike the many places we had lived in since the war changed our lives, this was the place I loved. I knew the road to it, and knew where the road led to beyond it. The skin of my bare feet recognized the skin of the red earth with all its wrinkles. The thornbushes often pricked me, but I knew how to pull out the thorns. And I liked to walk around the miniature pyramidlike mounds of fresh earth dug out by the moles. I knew the weak-sighted moles were there even if I had never seen them.
Night in this place filled me with fear, but that fear ended in the morning and I got used to the rhythm of fear coming to my heart and leaving it. I began to identify the sounds of night crickets as star sounds because the stars and the crickets came out together. One twinkled to the ear, the other to the eye.
And I knew the breeze that trekked from the bottom of the hill and flew into our windows. It filled the curtains with a daily dance and softly kissed my face. Flapping my arms to let the breeze tickle me, for a moment I felt free, like a bird, tasting the sky. All here was mine, and felt like home to me. Sitting silently, I knew for sure that I did not want to leave this place ever again, no matter what Mother decided.
The soldiers continued to come to the hill, but now they trained farther away from our home. We could see their helmets appear and disappear in the distance. At night, a giant beam of light like an endless sword scraped from one end of the sky to the other. It looked like the longest windshield wiper ever, and it whipped our house and windows. It lit our faces for seconds as it slashed through. “This is a searchlight,” my father said. “It helps soldiers monitor the area at night.”
“What if they see something they don't like?” I asked.
“They will attack,” he replied.
Because there was no electricity in our home or around us, the searchlight was astounding. Thinking about faraway soldiers watching us, I wondered whether I was sleeping right, and whether those soldiers could see inside my mind
that I was upset with what they were doing. I did not want them to come to our house, especially at night. So I stopped myself from thinking about the light, covered my head, and tried to fall asleep. But the light was powerful—it lit up the entire room whenever it suddenly appeared. It woke me up again and again until my brothers and I invented games about it—guessing when it would come and how many times a night it would return. When we were done playing, we slept on our faces and pulled pillows over our heads.
Not wanting to be alone either day or night, Mother came up with a plan to fill our house with company while Father was gone during the day. She had sewn since she was a young girl and had taken additional classes at Dar El-Tifl. Now she told our relatives, her friends, and distant neighbors in the Irsaal area at the bottom of the hill that she would tailor clothes for them. Soon, our home was full of women and children who nicknamed Mother “Mirriam Al-Jabaleyyah,” Mirriam of the Mountain, because they had to climb the big hill to reach our house. Every day our floor was carpeted with colorful rolls of fabric, yarn, sewing patterns, and issues of
Burda
, a fashion magazine.
Burda
was written in German, a language taught at Dar El-Tifl. Mother could not read or speak German, but she used the sewing patterns as though she understood every word. I gazed at the
Burda
pages, with their pictures of girls who stood next to their bicycles, carried flowers in baskets, smiled, and wore new dresses and shoes. They had long, golden braids that rested on their backs.
“How beautiful!” Mother exclaimed. “Green and blue eyes, and skin white like milk.”
None of the
Burda
girls looked like me. My hair and eyes were the color of coffee. But I wanted to be exactly like them, so that I might have new dresses, shoes, and especially a bicycle.
Our Singer sewing machine worked by pushing a pedal. Mother sat in a chair and pumped the pedal up and down with her feet while her hands steered the stitches on wedding and maternity dresses, children's clothes, pajamas, and skirts. People laughed happily as they twirled around in front of the narrow mirror and saw themselves in their new clothes. Everyone said that Mother's sewing was better than anything purchased from a store.
Mother's sewing business grew. More and more fabrics were spread out on the floor of our home until she needed the entire space for her sewing. We moved our play outside—under the grapevines within the wall Father had built.
If we hit one another while we were playing and distracted her, Mother warned that she would give us to the Yahood, the Jews. The only Jews we knew were the Israeli soldiers. “Take this one; I want to get rid of him,” she would say, pretending to give us away.
Soon Mother seemed to give up and let us play in the front yard more often, then outside our wall, on the road. Gradually, we felt that she was not afraid for us anymore. Her only rules were that we must wait to go outside the wall until the light fell against our house with an angle that signified
four o'clock. Mother, who did not have a watch, judged time by the sun and the lengths of shadows. Before four, she said, venomous snakes and scorpions roamed in the heat. The second rule was that the three of us must be together at all times. I was happy with that rule.
Basel and Muhammad made paper rockets and kites. We searched under rocks, amid thorns, and under trees for any abandoned materials we could turn into parts for toys we would invent. Everything could be used—cans, metal pieces, broken glass, wild animal bones, or bells that fell from the necks of goats herded by shepherds. And with each passing day, we dared to go closer to the soldiers, until one afternoon we stood only yards away and could look into their faces.
They motioned for us to leave. We retreated for a few minutes, then returned. We had become more curious than scared. What intrigued me most was how soldiers, clutching wide-open umbrellas, jumped from flying planes and landed on the ground unharmed.
When the soldiers left every evening, we searched the countless trenches they had dug, climbed the barbed-wire fences they had erected, dragged home the cardboard people that were left standing pierced everywhere with bullet holes, filled our pockets with empty bullet cartridges, and glared at the huge amounts of food the soldiers threw away. But Mother warned us not to eat any of the chocolate spreads, jams, sliced breads, or cookies, or drink any of the chocolate milk in the cartons the soldiers regularly left behind.
“It could poison you,” she said. And so we never ate or drank any of it.
One afternoon, as we were searching the grounds, my brothers found a gun. “A Sten!” they shouted. The soldiers had left it behind. It was so heavy it took both of them to lift it up. Basel held the front end, the metal barrel, and Muhammad held the back. We began to walk home carrying it as though it were a deer we had hunted. But only moments later, a jeep filled with soldiers arrived. They shouted and gestured to my brothers to drop the gun. Then they took it and left.
Gradually, when we returned from our adventures, Mother stopped asking us where we had been. She knew. She mended our clothes torn by the barbed-wire fences, daubed our cuts and scrapes with iodine, and shook her head.
 
Like my brothers and me, the soldiers were always in groups. They came and left together. But one day a soldier appeared in a jeep after everyone else had left. We were surprised to see him. He was speeding and appeared not to know that the gravel road swerved, then dead-ended shortly past our house. We watched. When the jeep reached the end and took a sharp turn, it spun around and landed on its side.
“Accident!” we all exclaimed. We instantly wanted to know what had happened to the driver, so we raced to the site. But when we were only a few yards away, we stopped.
We looked into one another's eyes for courage to move closer. What if he was dead? We held on to one another's clothes and inched forward till we could see him. His chest was caught under the steering wheel.
We knocked at the jeep's window. He looked up, able to move only a hand. Dressed in his khaki uniform and helmet, he looked like a helpless turtle flipped upside down. He whimpered, then spoke faintly. We did not understand him and replied in anxious, loud voices, asking him what he needed. He did not understand us either.
But when he pointed his thumb to his open mouth, we knew what he wanted. We ran home and hurried back with a bucket of drinking water. But how could we reach him to help him drink?
Before we could decide what to do, another jeep tore down the gravel road, and then other vehicles followed.
“Rooh lebaitak,”
someone said to us, ordering us to go home. But we did not want to go. Instead we watched from a distance as the injured soldier was pulled out of the jeep, placed on a stretcher, and taken away.
The wrecked jeep remained abandoned for two days. We wanted to play inside it but were afraid, so we only circled it. Finally, a truck with a winch hauled it away like a dead animal. It left a hole in the ground that kept the image of the jeep alive in our minds every time we passed it. We described the accident to one another over and over. And we hoped that the wounded soldier would live and heal.
I realized then that the Israeli soldiers had become part of our daily life. We watched them, imitated them, puzzled
over their actions, and talked about them all the time. They were the source of our anxiety and our entertainment.
The day of that accident was also the day I began to worry about my father. He drove a truck for long hours. Sometimes he fell asleep at the wheel and told us about it when he came home. Sometimes he even took one of my brothers with him, to wake him up if he nodded off.
I could see him in my mind, driving in the summer heat, his sleeves rolled up, his elbow always showing from the window. I worried he might fall asleep one day, lose control of his truck, have a wreck, be injured. He would be alone, wanting water, unable to drink it. And who would help him?

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