Mornings in Jenin (18 page)

There were three of them at half past midnight one Saturday. They walked in together, their hasty plan still written on their faces with marks of apprehension. Three customers were already in the store and Bo Bo, the owner, had left only an hour earlier. Two of the boys went to opposite corners of the store and the third waited in line at the register where I stood behind the counter. I knew something was wrong, and as I collected money from the paying customer, I replayed Bo Bo’s instructions in my head. “If you ever get held up, just give them all the money and don’t hold back,” he had said when I had first started working a year earlier. At the counter, the young robber laid down two packs of spearmint gum and a bottle of Coca-Cola and added a 9 mm. Then, he demanded money. His eyes were flooded with fear and his dark skin was pulled smooth by his youth. The other boys busied themselves collecting loot from the shelves and covered the door. I was struck by the irony of that boy’s fear and my calm. As I emptied the cash register of its contents into a brown paper bag, I thought how I should be more frightened. The boy’s gun was a toy compared to M-16 assault rifles. “You. Stop!” An M-16 in my face. “You. Go this way.” An M-16 at my chest. “Everybody, turn back. This is now a closed military area.” An M-16 swinging across the crowd, maybe fired a few times in the air if we didn’t move fast enough.

After I gave the boy all the money, I showed him a hidden change box where his friends could find an extra thirty dollars. Then I gave him a carton of cigarettes. “I don’t smoke,” he remarked, stunned.

They left. I called Bo Bo, not the police. The following weekend, also on Saturday, Bo Bo came to the store dragging a boy by the collar. “Is this the one?” he asked. It was that same frightened young man who had threatened me with a 9 mm. I nodded and Bo Bo, whose real name was Bernard, turned his brawny black body on the boy, knocking him and the contents of the candy aisle shelf to the floor. “You either pay me now what you stole or you show up here every day to work it off,” he growled with authority only a fool would dare disobey. The young man—Jimmy was his name—kept working for Bo Bo even after he had paid his debt. The police never knew about it. “He just got caught in the dragnet, is all. It’s an old web that squeezes black folk until they got no more juice,” Bo Bo told me.

What I knew for sure was that people in West Philly thought I was beautiful, not different, and my accent was not a call for mistrust. The very things that made me suspect to the white world were backstage passes in the black neighborhoods.

TWENTY-FIVE

The Telephone Call from Yousef

1978–1981

THE SUMMER OF 1978, before I started graduate study at the University of South Carolina, I gave in to the egging of my housemates to go to Myrtle Beach.

I had, for the previous five years, selfishly tuned the world out. The Yom Kippur War came and went in 1973, as did further turbulence in Palestine, and Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords were soon to be signed—all without response from me. I deliberately avoided political discussions, did not write to the people who loved me, and let myself be known as “Amy”—Amal without the hope. I was a word drained of its meaning. A woman emptied of her past. The truth is that I wanted to be someone else. And that summer at Myrtle Beach, I was Amy in a bathing suit, lounging on the sand as far away from myself as I had ever been.

It took me days to find a suitable swimming suit. A bikini was out of the question.

“Wow. Were you in an accident or something?” Kelly asked in the changing room when she saw my belly.

“Something,” I answered.

I chose a conservative black suit because it had a cluster of plastic daisies, a rather silly-looking thing, on the fabric that fell over the most obvious indentation in my abdomen.

I had assumed the Mediterranean shores of Haifa would be the dominant beaches of my life. But at age twenty-three, I swam in ocean water for the first time, and I wormed my toes in the Atlantic sand of a South Carolina beach.

I stretched my body to receive the sun, the same one that had risen over Jenin since the dawn of my life and had brought me purple skies and poetry in the asthmatic baritone coming through Baba’s chest.

No soldiers here. No barbed wire or zones off-limits to Palestinians. No one to judge me. No resistance or cries or chants. I was anonymous. Unloved. Wearing my first bathing suit, I remembered Huda’s great yearning after the Battle of Karameh, when we thought we would return to our Palestine. “To sit by the ocean. Just to sit, since I can’t swim,” was her wish, at the top of that naïve list we had made in our youth.
Huda
.

One year into graduate studies in South Carolina, I received my green card and adopted the United States as my new country.

Amy.
Amal of the steadfast refugees and tragic beginnings was now Amy in the land of privilege and plenitude. The country that flowed on the surface of life, supine beneath unwavering skies. But no matter what facade I bought, I forever belonged to that Palestinian nation of the banished to no place, no man, no honor. My Arabness and Palestine’s primal cries were my anchors to the world. And I found myself searching books of history for accounts that matched the stories Haj Salem had told.

Another year passed.
Whatever you feel
. . . I kept it all in. Until one day when the telephone rang at five a.m. Half-sleeping, I picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Aloo,” answered an accented male voice. “Amal?”

“Aywa,” I said, suspecting his identity and fully awake now. He chuckled, a sound I could recognize anywhere. It was the muffled laughter that first escaped from the right side of Yousef ’s mouth, then stretched a smile across his handsome face. A lifetime ago, Fatima had told me that my brother’s smile had melted her heart the first time she ever saw him, when he was sixteen and she fourteen.

“Finally, little sister! We’ve been trying for months to find you.”

Someone took the phone. “Amal! Habibti, darling! We found you.” It was Fatima.

Amal. I cried at the sound of my Arabic name. The telephone was an inadequate connection to transmit the warm longing and surprise as we tried to speak through sobs and static.

“We’re pregnant.” Their first child. “Where are you in the U.S.? We’re in Lebanon now. You know what they did to the PLO in Jordan, the bastards.”

I heard Yousef interrupt. “Not now, habibti,” he said to his wife.

“Okay, darling.” And she continued.

It was a long story of endless fighting—“Yousef will tell you all about it”—through which ran a river of endless love—“but you already know that.”

My brother had risen through the ranks of the PLO in the decade following the Battle of Karameh. The movement gained so much popular support in Jordan that the Hashemite monarchy feared for its own survival and crushed the Palestinian guerrillas and civilians in terrible massacres that marked the ninth month as Black September. The PLO was thus pushed into Lebanon in 1971, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, and my brother took up a teaching position at an UNRWA school that served the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where he also continued to operate within the ranks of the Palestinian fighters.

“I never gave up waiting for him, you know . . . I’ll tell you all the details when we meet again. Yousef misses you terribly. So do I, darling,” Fatima said.

Despite the long years of absence and the uncertainty of Yousef ’s whereabouts and Fatima’s fate, each had held fast to their love, resisting the pressures of tradition to marry any other. Finally, in 1977, after difficult probing, Yousef learned that his love had not married, and he immediately sent Fatima a letter that took almost a full year to travel less than fifty miles south through underground channels to Bartaa village, where Fatima still lived with her mother.

“It was as if Allah opened the heavens and dropped that letter for my heart,” Fatima said. The heart that longed for my brother as much as life longed for breath. Within three months, they were united and married in Beirut. To make that journey, Fatima said a final farewell to her family and country, because once she left, Israel would not allow her to return to the land it occupied. She gave up everything she knew to marry my brother and never regretted it. He was thirty-four and she was thirty-two.

“Little sister, you better get here before Fatima makes you an aunt!”

“When is she due?”

“Sometime in the middle of June.”

“It’s December now. That gives me a few months to save up for a ticket and finish my master’s.”

“A master’s degree? . . . Baba sure would be proud.”

Even after so many years, I longed to make my father proud. Wherever he was. I looked out the window and saw that the sun was making its ascent, and I got choked up for the force of light, Baba’s smile, coming into the room.

“Hurry up and get here, sis. We miss you.”

“I miss you more. I’ll be there soon.”

Yousef left a number where I could leave a message for him to call me at a specified time. Reluctantly, I hung up the phone.

I graduated in June with no plans but to go to Lebanon. Ever since Yousef ’s call, I had thought of little else but to return to my family, to myself. But I had also forged real ties in America and in many ways, the place I had called home for the past years had become part of me. I was sad to leave my friends, but I was happy in the face of what awaited me as I boarded a plane to Beirut, hoping to arrive before Fatima made me an aunt.

V.

ALBI FI BEIRUT

(my heart in Beirut)

TWENTY-SIX

Majid

1981

A GUST OF WARM, DRY wind greeted me as I stepped off the plane onto Lebanon’s soil. Beirut International Airport was an ominous place, made so by too many rifles strapped to too many uniformed soldiers. But the guttural silk tones of Arabic rippled through me as I heard the melodic calls and responses of my language. It’s a dance, really. A man at a desk was offered tea as I walked through the metal detectors. He said, “Bless your hands” to the one making the offer, who responded, “And your hands, and may Allah keep you always in Grace.” Calls and responses that dance in the air.

Emerging from tense immigration lines, I found a tall, haggard man standing impassively behind a sign that bore my name. His dark eyes were set deep beneath straggled eyebrows. Sparse hairs sprang haphazardly at his jawline in a vain struggle to become a beard, and a meticulously symmetrical mustache could not conceal the fullness of his lips. When our eyes met, recognition pulled his face into a smile.

“Al hamdulillah ala salama,” he said, extending a hand. “My name is Majid. Your brother sent me to pick you up.”

“And God keep you in safety, too,” I replied.
Calls and responses
.

“I knew you right away. You look like Yousef.”

“We take after our mother.”

He smiled, taking my luggage.

Beirut’s traffic moved in jolts amid a bedlam of honking horns. Bicycles darted between cars as Majid drove patiently through the uproar, apologizing for the “foul lexicon” of the street as mustached drivers, irate and sweaty, hurled colorful insults at one another. Arabic profanities are often nothing more than a gratuitous reference to the anatomy of a female relative. Simply the mention of it. “Go, fool! Your mother’s pussy.” Another, “Are you waiting for the red carpet to move your damn car? Your sister’s pussy!” And there’s always “Curses upon your father and your father’s father!”

Dispersed in the pandemonium, peddlers sold newspapers, flowers, and Chiclets while the aroma of freshly baked bread— the streetside displays of sesame kaak with crushed thyme and cheese—crawled through my senses into memories of Palestine.

“It’s good to be on Arab soil again,” I thought aloud.

“I hear you’ve been gone quite a while,” Majid said after a brief pause.

“Yes, quite a while.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, it’s okay. I went on a scholarship and couldn’t go back to Jenin. You know how it is when you’re gone for a while. The Israelis don’t let you come back . . .”
Furthermore, I had nothing, no one, to go back to. And to be honest, I wanted to be an American. I wanted to pack away my baggage of past and tragedy and try on Amy for size
.

I turned my head to the open window to end the subject and inhale more of the hot jibneh and zaatar on sesame kaak from the sidewalk carts.

Majid called out the window and a vendor, a slender, kindly old man, approached with two large kaaks wrapped in newspaper.

“May God give you a long life, haj,” Majid said to thank the old man, and paid him.

“And may he grant you and your family happiness, son,” the old man replied.

“I’ll bet you haven’t had one of these in a while.” Majid turned to me with a jibneh kaak.
That smile again
.

Thrilled, I thanked him: “Bless your hands. They’re made of kindness and chivalry.”

“I knew something could make you smile.”

Majid’s shy, fine manner contradicted the gruff exterior I had first noted. “My mother and I often took long walks together when I was a boy and I’d always make her stop to buy me one of these tasty things,” he said, gently parting the silence. I listened, not wanting to spoil his memory with conversation or interrupt the smooth equanimity of his voice.

The dented small Fiat barely accommodated Majid’s long body, pushing his head slightly down from the roof and his knees up near the steering wheel. We ate in the sun-dusted quiet of the car, windows up and occasional horns barking at our slow pace, and his color reddened when the hand shifting into fifth gear accidentally brushed against my leg.

“Excuse me. I’m very sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Farther on, traffic dwindled on the potholed, partially paved roads.

“Why didn’t Yousef come himself to pick me up?”

“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you,” he exclaimed, lightly smacking his forehead. “Fatima had her baby. You have a niece!” His eyes widened as those of bearers of good news do. “Yousef was hoping for a boy, but he melted just the same when he saw his daughter,” Majid said.

I’m an aunt!

“Don’t all Arab men want a son first?” I joked, feeling more comfort with this man. We laughed.

“Actually, I imagine a little girl. Sara, after my mother, mercy on her soul. But truly, whatever Allah grants is a blessing,” Majid replied. His voice was like velvet, his profile an embodiment of certainty, and his presence assuring.
He looks like Che Guevara
.

Shatila was one of three Beirut-area refugee camps. Next to it, Sabra, and both were similar to Jenin’s camp, densely packed mazes of concrete and clay shacks that had risen from the indignity of handout tents for Palestinians who had fled the war in 1948. Culverts carried raw sewage in the alleyways, where children played and floated paper boats downstream.

I knew we had arrived when children began to swarm around the Fiat. We had done the same when I was a child. In particular, we had badgered visitors and UN investigators to no end, desperate to pose for their clicking cameras. Though we never saw the photos, we nonetheless had fought one another for positions in front of their lenses. Seeing the children at Shatila now gave me a look at myself as I must have appeared to those visitors—bedraggled and needy. But in truth, we had been excited when they visited and we had happily basked in their Western grace. We had wanted only their approval, expressed in the passing attention of a camera shutter, a smile, a question, and sometimes, candy treats, which Huda and I had always shared.

Majid reached into the glove compartment, pulling out a handful of candy. “I did this once and now they expect it. I get in big trouble if I come empty-handed.”

Majid at the center, giddy children around, the sweetness of candy. How Huda and I would have loved such a man in our youth. “Doktor Majid! Doktor Majid!” the children called out, and he caught the surprise in my face. I had not taken him for an educated man. I had viewed him with Amy’s eyes. This he saw. And I lowered my eyes, embarrassed by the judgment he knew I had made in our initial contact.

A white sun followed us through the trash-strewn town to Fatima’s and Yousef ’s house. It was a single-story structure with two crumbling steps leading to the front door. Its roof, like others, was mostly corrugated metal and asbestos held in place with rocks, old tires, and anything else to lend weight against the wind. Outside, a crowd of some twenty men was gathered, improvising chairs, laughing, smoking, and passing a tray of knafe, a cheese delicacy soaked in sweet syrup. No doubt in celebration of my niece’s birth.

There he was.

Yousef! My brother, dear God!

Now, after thirteen years of separation, only a small distance remained. Twenty footsteps at most. Easily traversed. A short walk along a dirt path where a canary cage and potted flowers tried to defy poverty.

“Amal!” He saw me and rose at once among his PLO comrades, the waxed tips of his mustache curled at the corners of his smile.

I dropped my small handbag and ran to him. Safe in his embrace, I remained there as long as I could, trying to siphon the lost years from his massive chest, which felt so much like our father’s. For a moment, my brother’s arms dulled the aloneness of my life.

In the courtyard, a group of women, wives of the men outside, were keeping watch over mother and infant. They leapt with hugs and kisses when we entered.

“It is nice to finally meet you,” said several at once.

“Fatima has told us so much about you,” said others. A woman in a dotted red scarf pursed her lips and said, “Fatima told us you were shot when you were little, may Allah shoot them all.”

“Amen to that,” said another. “Here, have some tea. And knafe.”

The eldest among them, in a traditional embroidered thobe and white headscarf, rose with some labor, interrupting the others. “You think she’s here to see you? Or her kinfolk and the baby?” She led us into the communal space of my brother’s three-room home. A kitchen and bathroom off the courtyard made up the rest of the house.

Fatima appeared comatose, depleted from twenty-one hours of labor, and my baby niece lay swaddled next to her mother in angelic sleep. They had named her Falasteen, the Arabic word for Palestine.

“How original,” I joked to Yousef, who reached for his baby girl.

Broad-shouldered Yousef, his vast tenderness cradling tiny Falasteen, was a sight to behold. When I think of him now, that sublime moment of unspoiled, unconditional devotion to his family is what I see. I still hear his words. “I am holding the most perfect of all God’s creations. Like a turn, little sister?”

“Ismallah, ismallah!” I took my baby niece with great care, my heart tiptoeing in that house of love. Her small mouth opened in a delicate yawn and I moved closer to drink her scent. There is nothing quite so pure, as if pieces of God live in the faint breaths of babes. In Falasteen’s yawn, I caught a whiff of divine promise, bequeathed even to us.

I placed my niece at her sleeping mother’s breast and watched my brother, turgid with affection, look back and forth from his wife and to his newborn daughter. In that refugee camp, which Israel would label a “breeding ground of terrorists” and a “festering den of terror,” I bore witness to a love that dwarfed immensity itself.

Later, alone with my brother in the courtyard, it was time. “I have something for you,” I said, removing Baba’s pipe from my pocket. I handed the package to him slowly, as Ammo Jack O’Malley, mercy on his soul, had given it to me years before when he took me to the orphanage in Jerusalem.

The heavy, turtle-paced creep of gravity prodded Yousef to rise on his legs. And the frail waft of honey apple tobacco, as he uncovered our father’s smoking pipe, turned those legs to clay. Yousef ’s shoulders drooped and I saw my brother cry for the first time in my life.

“How did you get this?” he asked, composing himself and wiping tears.

The constant, background-humming craving for just one more moment with our father moved to the forefront of our yearnings, crowning the next hours between brother and sister getting to know one another as adults. He was sorry for having left me in Jenin. He’d have taken us with him, if he could have. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when Mama died.” He hadn’t heard about my being shot until a year after. Life hadn’t been easy.
Nor for me
. But we were a family again and now there was a baby, a promise that we could live on.

“I didn’t know what else to do, Amal. But I want to make it up to you. I want to be here for you now.”

“You did the best you could, brother. I know that,” I said.

“There are some things I never told you,” Yousef began. He looked down at his hands, as if placing the words in his palm first before uttering them. “Our brother Ismael, the baby we lost in forty-eight, is alive,” Yousef said, looking intently at my face.

He was surprised when I told him that I already knew, or at least I had always suspected ever since Huda and I had overheard him talking so many years earlier about the
Yahoodi they call David
.

“Does Huda also know?”

“I don’t think your conversation that day left the same impression on her as it did on me. Anyway, we never spoke of it.”

My brother and I served Fatima in bed when she awoke and the three of us feasted together on reunion and family, nibbling from the side dishes of Nablus jibneh and watermelon. I can replay the details of that day in my mind now, only they come to me strangely without sound. The rhapsody of mother and child is metered in the shallow bobs of Falasteen’s little head as she breastfeeds. Fatima is beautiful, overjoyed, in love. Something funny is said and I notice a silver filling in Yousef ’s back teeth as his laughter opens his mouth wide. The bread—the large, thin Iranian khobz that I love—is torn and passed.

Later, Yousef saunters proudly around the camp holding his baby girl. I take her for a while, and Yousef leans back in his seat, lighting our father’s pipe with fresh tobacco. He inhales the smoke and his eyelids fall, moving my brother to some memory that makes him grin. He opens his eyes and we are secure in the scent of our father. My memory can read the movement of his lips but cannot hear the words now: “Baba and Mama would have danced today,” Yousef says. Since he was a boy, he had wanted to watch them dance again as they had the day Jiddo Yehya returned with his forbidden fruits from Ein Hod, and all the refugees had rejoiced.

I snapped many photographs that evening in Shatila, but there is one in particular that I treasure, that I framed and placed on the mantel. It evokes the details of that day’s happiness. It is the photo that would one day leave my Pennsylvania home in a CIA evidence box, after which I would frantically search for the negative to print another copy. My big brother is frozen in a silly, toothy grin holding his firstborn child, Falasteen, while Fatima, the love of his life, sweetly leans on his shoulder, smiling, in their tiny dwelling in that shanty refugee town.