Mornings in Jenin (16 page)
Only once did I get the privilege of the pipe, but not because I made it to the courtyard in time. Drina took pity on me as I stood in line one particularly cold night when I was also suffering a fever. She ordered a young girl named Sonya from the best of the pipe positions to let me take her place. I gratefully accepted, shivering in that warm spot until we could enter the dining hall for our dinner of one piece of mortadella, a slice of bread, and as much tea as we liked.
Of course, I recovered under Layla’s care, thanks to her herbal concoctions and cold compresses. None of us was surprised, or even disappointed, when Layla announced one evening that she was converting to Christianity to join the convent after graduation and live with Sister Clairie. Drina thought it was a phase but Layla did eventually join the Carmelite Order of nuns, devoting her life to God and to the girls who went to live at Darel Tiflorphanage, where we had come into young adulthood behind stone walls and beneath the hard watch of Haydar.
But for Layla’s nurturing, I would have lived bald in the orphanage because my hair was frequently infested with lice. Lice inspection day was the first of the month. A few days before, we all got busy picking lice from one another’s hair to avoid the dreaded shaver. We’d line up in trains, pulling lice and pushing the little pests into kerosene-filled cans. Layla looked after my hair. And thanks to Yasmina’s “white comb,” another of her ingenious inventions, which could pull out hundreds of the little buggers in one swipe, my long black hair never met the shaver.
A sad “shaver story” happened to a pretty young girl named Souad who was about to graduate and get married. Her beautiful chestnut hair had grown to her waist when Haydar claimed to have found lice in it. There was nothing anyone could do but listen to Souad’s screams as her wavy locks fell to the floor. Drina believed that Haydar was jealous of Souad and made up the whole thing about finding lice in her hair. “She knew Souad was getting married,” Drina said, “and the old hag couldn’t bear it.” We all agreed.
Among Yasmina’s other great inventions was the Z-tongue. This was a language she devised, similar to pig Latin except with a “Z” sound inserted between consonants. To the great irritation of Miss Haydar, we became quite fluent in this speech, which we put to use poking fun at her corpulence and nostrils, which started at the human and ended just before the clown.
The friendships I forged in the orphanage are the substance of my fondest memories of adolescence. Of course, I could never replicate the bond between Huda and me. She and I were forever bound by our childhood, by six days of terror in the kitchen hole, and by a sisterhood that remained unmatched throughout my life. But fate had snipped a tear in our lives, setting us on divergent paths.
Huda was able to visit me once during my four years in the orphanage. Although travel to Jerusalem was difficult, she made it there with Osama in February 1973 to tell me that they were expecting their first child. Their togetherness had bloomed with a quiet splendor I could not understand then, and the life growing inside her cast a halo of promise and hope around them both.
At first, I could not find my best friend in the beauty who seemed so grown up, so much more of a woman than I. She looked alluring and exotic, her eyes part tiger, part human. But her steadfast and tender character hushed her beauty, and her face pulled you in. Even decades later, after time had scribbled lines on her cheeks and furrowed the tales of age in her brow, Huda’s face could hold you spellbound, as you searched for the secret you knew was there, just behind the yellow streaks in her eyes. She didn’t know the extent of her own beauty and that made it even greater.
“I’ve missed you,” she said, tears at the rims of her eyes. I think it was at that moment in my life that I first felt the coolness of my own heart and found Mama’s walls cementing inside me. It frightened me to think I could so easily do away with the pain of loss and separation. I leapt toward my childhood friend, muffling my discovery and our sobs on each other’s shoulders. She cried because she loved me and had felt a great void in her life since I had left Jenin. I cried because although I loved her, too, I could not feel it with the same intensity as she.
In the process of trying to steady my gait in a life that shook with uncertainty, I learned to make peace with the present by unknowingly breaking love lines to the past. Growing up in a landscape of improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt temporary to me. Nothing could be counted on to endure, neither parents nor siblings nor home. Not even one’s body, vulnerable as it was to bullets. I had long since accepted that one day I would lose everything and everyone, even Huda. I understood that in my best friend’s arms that day, and I cried selfishly for myself, and for the crystals freezing over my heart.
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” Huda sobbed. “Jenin is not the same without you.”
Huda learned to love what she had and to take what sweetness she could from life, her memories as pillars of strength. The refugee camp was good enough. She found solace in the bonds she forged by the strings of her own heart. With faith and prayer she could manufacture serenity, even after soldiers ransacked her house in their endless search for “terrorists.” As long as she could return to the arms of love at the end of each day, that was all that mattered to her.
We spent Huda’s visit on the school grounds, as I was not allowed to leave, while Osama went off to the Old City. I introduced Huda to the orphanage gang, all of whom embraced her with warm enthusiasm, and we spent the day in the fun world of young women. We listened intently to Huda’s responses when Drina grilled her about sex, for Huda was the only one among us to have experienced the great mystery. We took turns listening to her belly, trying to wake the baby, begging for somersaults. It moved a few times, like a shadow behind a curtain, and we screamed with delight each time at the sense of magic and miracle that only babies can inspire by their mere movements. The six of us ate from a pot of lamb in yogurt stew that Huda had brought with her. Yasmina divvied up the meat, concentrating behind the lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses.
“Those are interesting glasses, Yasmina. I’ve never seen frames like that before,” Huda said. We answered her almost in unison, “She made them herself.”
“She’s always making and inventing things, our Yasmina,” Drina said with uncharacteristic pride.
“I can make you a pair, Huda, if you have the lenses,” Yasmina offered, eyes wide, eager for the chance to construct something.
As much as we wanted to believe that nothing would change, that we would remain a family of five friends forever, graduation crept toward us. In 1973, Drina had been out of school for two years, but she had remained at the orphanage as a gym teacher while she took college courses at the Islamic University. Layla had already embarked on her journey in the Christian faith and moved into a convent, living behind other stone walls. Yasmina and I graduated together that year, both of us with high honors, and Muna had one more year to go.
Though Yasmina was the smartest and most studious among us, a scholarship came my way instead of hers. It was offered by a group of wealthy Arab-Americans for Palestinian refugees. Since Yasmina’s family had fled to Latin America and never had lived in a refugee camp, she was not eligible. I think the opportunity for a college education abroad made her wish she had lived in a refugee camp.
I emerged confident and drained from the last of five arduous days of academic testing and waited for the verdict. I wanted desperately to win that scholarship, but only for the validation it offered. I couldn’t imagine going anywhere but back to the familiarity of Jenin, or perhaps I would remain in the orphanage to teach, like Drina. Certainly, I was not prepared to go to the United States, where the scholarship would lead. The world at home frightened me enough. Why would I risk going into an unfamiliar world where no one spoke Arabic and where I knew no hiding places? Getting high marks was an end in itself. My father had wanted an education for me and I had obediently planted my life in the soil of his dream. I simply wasn’t conditioned to plan for a distant future.
But Yasmina had a small genius of foresight and made plans and fallback plans. She slapped me hard across the face when I told her, rather casually, that I might not take the scholarship.
“Who do you think you are, refusing such a gift?” Her question tolled in my ear. Only by extraordinary odds and rare luck could someone like me find such an opportunity in the pitiable destiny that was my birthright. Who did I think I was, indeed.
“I’d give anything to have that damn scholarship!” Now she was screaming, not at me, but at something neither of us could see. She screamed at the cruelty of chance that would not notice her intellect and the hours she had spent in study. She had dreamed of college, and she dreamed even harder when there were rumors of scholarships.
I felt ashamed in the shadow of Yasmina’s disappointment, and that evening, while I sat alone on the balcony, she flung open the doors of friendship with good advice. “Don’t be stupid, Amal. Get past the fear,” she said, and returned inside, leaving me to the indifference of a crescent moon cradled in a star-speckled black ether.
When I was a child, Haj Salem told me that answers can be found in the sky if you look long and hard enough. He told me that the arrangements of stars were divine hieroglyphics that could be deciphered by faithful hearts. To that tapestry of stars, I offered up my greatest wound. There was nothing left for me in Jenin but scraps of my childhood and the debris of the family lost forever, all of it packed beneath the boots and tank treads of patrolling Israeli soldiers. If I returned, unavoidable marriage awaited me in the traditional culture of Jenin’s refugee camp. My awful scar, my disfigured body, made me dread marriage, which would surely bring a new flavor of rejection and abandonment.
Who was I, indeed!
A pathetic orphan, stateless and poor, living off charity. The American scholarship was a gift I had no right to refuse. It sat mercifully in the path of my father’s greatest longings for his children.
As the moon smiled in the sky, I begged the night to sweep me up by surprise with a dream that was my own. For in my life, I had not yet dreamed my own dream.
I could not leave without seeing Huda and Osama and their baby girl, whom they had named Amal.
As a going-away present, my friends at the orphanage pitched in with whatever they had, though it barely reached a fraction of the taxi fare. Amazingly, Miss Haydar made up the difference with one hundred shekels. More baffling still was the hug that accompanied her generous gift. I moved my eyes from the money to meet that talcum-faced woman who drew her eyebrows with a pencil and brought a grumpy temper to her commission of running an orphanage. Beneath her rutted exterior and slight insanity, I saw an insecurity and felt a sense of sisterhood when she put her arms around me.
“Thank you, Miss Haydar,” I said sincerely.
“You’re welcome. Make us proud.”
Not wanting to be met by a crowd, I arrived in Jenin unannounced in the evening. I walked two miles from the Green Line, going through two Israeli checkpoints. Near the depopulated village of Allajune I found a Palestinian farmer who offered me a ride in his oxcart to Ziraain, on the perimeter of Jenin. He refused to take money—“I can’t take money from a young Arab daughter”—so I thanked him and walked the rest of the way. Three Israeli tanks were perched on the highlands overlooking the camp. Always there. Always watching.
It was dark when I started down the hill into the maze of slum homes and random alleyways, but I didn’t need light to navigate. I could simply close my eyes and see the dirt paths carved between homes. There was Ammo Darweesh’s chicken coop, my best hiding spot. One meter ahead was Lamya’s window, hung at eye level with two metal bars that her father had welded there after he’d caught a boy looking in. Then the path broke into three and I took the middle, most narrow, toward Huda’s home. The dwellings on either side were shoulder-width apart and I dragged my hands along their clay walls, just as Huda and I had always done. A few lights shone from windows silhouetted by tired souls shuffling about, but most of the camp was sleeping. The land was turned over to a choir of crickets, and the wild cats gathered on garbage piles looking for spoiled food or for the rats that foraged in the same territory. If I had not known the abiding generosity of the people in this camp, I’d have been afraid to be there after dark.
I stopped at a blue metal door, dented and scratched. I knocked lightly.
Osama peeked through a rusted-out hole before I heard the clangy whimpering of bolts coming undone in a hurry. Osama’s grin made his eyebrows stand at attention beneath the commotion of his messy hair, and his familiar good nature greeted me with delighted eyes.
“Ahlan! Ahlan!” he exulted, motioning for me to enter their small courtyard. A solitary electric bulb buzzed in the far corner, beneath which I could discern the outlines of hens sleeping on a bed of hay. Vegetables were growing in a long rectangular pot, hand-painted, no doubt, by Huda. Osama stopped my approach to their living quarters, the shadows revealing a sweet mischievousness in his face.
“Shh,” he said, finger to his lips. “Let’s surprise her.” He led me with exaggerated tiptoeing into their home. I followed, watching the young boy of my childhood, now a husband and father with a wispy mustache nesting on his boyish face and an irrepressible love for his family leaking from his pores. Later, watching Osama and Huda together gave me a sure sense that they were meant for one another. After three years of marriage they spoke to one another in a way that reminded me of two kittens at play.