Where the Streets Had a Name (4 page)

When the coal is grey and alive with heat, he picks it up with his tongs and places it on the foil, pressing down. Our apartment block has a front porch on the ground floor that looks over a small communal garden. Baba carries the
argeela
to the porch and sits on the green bench, legs extended before him, one foot curled over the other.

He's a man imploded and there's nothing we can do to clear the debris inside him.

Mama sent me to follow him one morning. ‘Go alone,' she said. ‘For it will bring shame to this family if anyone knew I sent you.'

I told Samy anyway.

We followed Baba to Fréres Street, the highest point in Bethlehem. Baba walked slowly but purposefully, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his grey trousers. He led us to Bethlehem University, to an elevated point fenced by railings. I took a sharp breath as I saw the landscape before me: a panoramic view of Jebal Abo Ghnaim, except that it was now covered with settlements.

Baba leaned his elbow on the railings and looked at the horizon in silence, like a man standing at a headstone in a cemetery.

He stood there for half an hour, unnaturally still and barely moving.

Samy knew enough to remain silent.

On his way home, Baba stopped at a coffee shop. He took his mobile phone out of his shirt pocket and called a friend. Abo Hussein arrived shortly afterwards. Samy and I watched them order mint tea and an
argeela
each.

When Mama asked me where Baba went, I told her about the coffee shop only.

The curfew lasts for several more days. My parents fight over everything. Mohammed's nappy rash. Jihan's wedding plans. Failing to stock up on enough fetta cheese and bread. Putting too much sugar in the tea. Putting too little.

Jihan does her exercises in the cramped family room. Sit-ups, star jumps and jogging on the spot. She lifts cans of chickpeas and washing powder for muscle toning. When she can get away with it, she replaces meals with cigarettes (sucked up secretly behind the water tank on the rooftop of our apartment block). She has to stay hidden from the soldiers and from my parents, who strongly disapprove of smoking unless they are the ones doing it. Jihan is determined to lose weight before her wedding and is prepared to take on the Israel Defense Forces to do so. She should be more frightened of Mama and Baba.

Sitti Zeynab sits in her armchair for days. She thinks Jihan has gone mad. ‘A little meat on a woman is nice. Do you want people to look at you on your wedding day and think you had a holiday in Gaza?'

Jihan grits her teeth and presses on with her star jumps.

‘But I am just an old woman,' Sitti Zeynab says, grinning at Baba, who's too absorbed in smoking his
argeela
to interfere. ‘Why would the freshly hatched Jihan bother to listen to the wrinkled?'

‘First intelligent thing she's said in months,' Jihan mutters to me.

During the curfew Sitti Zeynab leaves her chair only to pray, go to the toilet and go to bed. She has an opinion about everything. Each day Mama finishes a packet of cigarettes before the sun sets and tries her best not to kill Sitti Zeynab or Baba.

I spend the curfew nights in front of the television, doing my homework. We're studying world music in English. My teacher is a Michael Jackson fan and loves the song ‘Remember the Time'. Our homework is to write our own song based on times we remember. I remember the time I was voted the best dancer in my class. I dance the
dabka
, a traditional folk dance, and when I dance I feel as though my feet have little wings on them. One step forward, bend at the knee, kick with the right foot, one step again.

I also remember when Mohammed was born and Mama bit Baba's arm during a contraction and drew blood. Baba was not allowed to so much as grimace.

I remember the time I saw my first – well, my first and only – movie at a cinema. It was in Ramallah and it was not so hard to travel there then. The movie was called
The Princess Diaries
and I ate all my popcorn and drank my can of Pepsi within the first fifteen minutes.

I remember Maysaa with her upside-down braid and buck teeth. I remember us in the playground showing the other girls some new
dabka
moves we'd learned in class. We formed a line and danced in a large circle around the playground, attracting new dancers as we sang:

O, you who passed by and waved with the hand
You marked the secrets of love in my heart
I heard your voice when you talked
Like a bird singing on top of an olive tree.

Maysaa's tongue always protruded slightly from her mouth as she concentrated on her dance moves. I remember Maysaa but her memory makes me sick because I also remember the day everything changed.

From that day I've been the one who occasionally wets the bed. I'm the one who is subjected to a
tsk tsk
, a depressed sigh and an open prayer every time my aunts, uncles and family friends gaze at my face. The women cup my chin in their hands, manufacture moistened eyes and exhale loudly, killing me with their garlic or cigarette breath. ‘Your beauty snatched away. Wasted. Oh my darling.'

On the last night of the curfew, I wake with a start from a familiar nightmare. Jihan and Tariq are snoring gently beside me. I frantically lower my hand to the mattress. Thank God it's dry this time.

Maysaa's face had filled my dreams. She's like a faulty tap that won't stop dripping. You don't notice it until the stillness of the night. And then each drip is like a nail being hammered into your head.

I rub the beads of sweat from my face. Sitti Zeynab is farting and snoring in blissful ignorance of my pain.

It's about three in the morning and I need fresh air. This is understandable given that I sleep in a room filled with enough gas to light a stove.

I tiptoe out of my room, past my parents' bedroom. Mohammed is fast asleep in between Mama and Baba. I slowly open the front door and peek out.

A jeep is on patrol. I quickly shut the door and wait for it to pass. I wait. And wait. And when I'm sure that it's passed I wait a little longer. Finally, I open the door a fraction again. Three soldiers are now roaming the narrow street. They're strapped with machine guns. They suddenly stop. Two of them look younger than Jihan; the third is as old as my father. They huddle together and one of them passes the other two a cigarette each. They light up and lean back against a broken stone fence in front of the dilapidated building of apartment blocks directly across from my home.

There's a deathly ghost town kind of silence to the night. There are no cars or footsteps. No bats or owls or rustling of leaves. Perhaps bats and owls have curfew restrictions too. The soldiers' voices crash against the silent night, like a bird smashing into a glass window.

One of the soldiers starts to tell a story. I can't help but stare and watch the transformation from soldier to human. His face lights up, vibrant and excitable. His gun jiggles up and down as he becomes more animated. The others roar with laughter.

I'm entranced. I lean my face against the door frame and stare at the trio standing a mere six metres from me. For days I've only seen the faces of my family. I study the soldiers' faces: the shape of their noses, the colour of their eyes, the contours of their cheekbones and the stubble mapped around their chins. My eyes glaze over and I'm weightless, unaware of my limbs, muscles, blood.

One of the soldiers sees me and, startled, points his gun at me. ‘Get inside!' he shouts in broken Arabic.

The other soldiers grab their guns and frantically look around, their eyes saucering in panic. The stench of fear is in the air. My fear, their fear, in dangerous competition.

I anxiously step back inside the house, slamming the door behind me.

 

 

The curfew is finally lifted. School is open again.

Samy knocks loudly on the front door. ‘
Yallah
, Hayaat!' he hollers. ‘Come on.'

I bound through the house and pass Mama, who, with a large loaf of bread in one hand and a screaming Mohammed in the other, yells at me to not run through the apartment.

‘Make sure you drink up that knowledge,' Sitti Zeynab cries.

‘She only has education going for her now,' I overhear Mama say to Sitti Zeynab with a heavy sigh. ‘For who will marry her with those scars?'

‘Don't worry. Every pea has a pod,' Sitti Zeynab says. ‘My Hayaat is royalty, I tell you.'

‘She could marry somebody blind,' Tariq says innocently.

‘Don't be
abeet
,' Jihan scolds.
Abeet
, dumb, is her standard label for Tariq. ‘We have standards too!'

I rush out of the apartment block and almost knock Samy off his feet. The first to accept a dare, lose his temper and bring a teacher to tears of exasperation, Samy is skinny and pale, his face framed by a heavy mane of wild black curls. His eyebrows are thick and black and hang over his small grey eyes. They say that his eyes were filled with colour before the imprisonment of his father, when he was six, and the death of his mother from a heart attack soon after. We moved to Bethlehem when I was nine and so I never knew Samy's parents.

They say that Samy's father was the type of person who commanded respect. ‘When he spoke, he inspired even the most foolish empty-head,' Um Ziyad, owner of the local bread store, informed my parents when we moved in and Mama and Baba were offered an exposition on the scandals of the surrounding homes. ‘Even the most lazy twit, my son included,' she told them, ‘was inspired to go on strike and to engage in civil disobedience after reading one of Abo Samy's essays or hearing him at a public address.'

They say Samy saw his father being dragged out of the house by agents from the Israeli internal security service,
Shabak
. Somebody had informed on him. That was common enough. The
Shabak
agents came in the evening. They beat Samy's father and then took him away. Samy never speaks about it. Maybe he was too young to remember the details. I've never dared ask.

Samy lives with his uncle and aunt, Amo Joseph and Amto Christina. They're childless. They do charity work at their church on Saturdays and Sundays, run religious workshops on week days, coordinate the replanting of uprooted olive trees in their spare time and volunteer at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency after dinner. According to Mama they're also ‘creating the cure for cancer, sewing up the ozone hole and bringing democracy to the Middle East'.

Amo Joseph and Amto Christina are both short and thin. They believe that television is the work of the devil and music is the devil's hobby. Hymns and nationalistic songs are approved. Cartoons, Hollywood movies and Arabic
X Factor
are not. Consequently, Samy and I have spent a lot of time trying to formulate a convincing argument to persuade Amo Joseph and Amto Christina that television will not result in us stewing over burning coals.

Baba likes Amo Joseph because when Amo Joseph's not saving Palestine, he's smoking his
argeela
. They never discuss religion. They sometimes discuss politics. They always discuss the ‘good old days', and most conversations include some mention of olives trees and figs.

Mama likes Amto Christina and Amo Joseph but disapproves of my friendship with Samy because he's ‘always scowling' and can regularly be heard to be arguing with Amto Christina and Amo Joseph about anything from leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor to going to church without brushing his hair.

Maybe Jewish mothers also disapprove of their daughters spending their spare time with boys, I don't know, but there are many times I've overheard Mama complain to Baba that it's unnatural for me to be so friendly with a boy. ‘She is still too young to know of such things,' Baba tells her.

‘Yes,' she replies, ‘but it is better to stop it now, before they both become aware. She has no girlfriends, ya Foad. Not since . . . Well, she hates to be around girls. She hates to be around anybody except Samy! It is wrong, ya Foad.'

‘Nur! Think for a moment. Is it not obvious why she does not like to be around girls?'

‘Well, yes, but there is something wrong about their friendship. It is too strong. I don't like it . . . It frightens me.'

‘Pah! They are both children, so let them enjoy their innocence while they still have it.'

For now Baba's view prevails and Mama is left to sigh melodramatically every time I tell her I'm outside playing with Samy.