Mornings in Jenin (23 page)
1983
APRIL ARRIVED IN 1983. On its eighteenth day, the month of flowers saw the harvesting of the bile that had been sown in Lebanon. Fire was vomited from the bowels of revenge, injustice, and yes, history, sending plumes of smoke onto every turned-on television screen.
My dreams the night before had forced me out of bed at three a.m., but I cannot recall those dreams now. I took coffee before taking in the sunrise, while Sara took my breast in her hungry sleep. I rocked her in my lap, her rapacious little lips suckling my nipple, and I reached for
The Prophet
, strewn on the floor among the chaotic piles of my books. I read these words, last read to me by my father when I was too innocent to understand:
A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body.
A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.
Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you.
It was but yesterday we met in a dream.
You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky.
But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn.
The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part.
If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more,
we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.
And if our hands should meet in another dream, we shal build another tower in the sky.
I did not read the newspapers that day. Always, there was an excuse to avoid the news, and always, I took it. But it came to me anyway on that eighteenth day of the month of flowers.
A man had driven a truck loaded with explosives into the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, killing sixty-three people and wounding scores more. The triangular compound was a horrid place, littered with body parts. Footage showed survivors dazed by the blast, walking aimlessly in what could have been hell. A man, overwhelmed by the bloodbath, sobbed against a wall. Another man and a woman, each having thought the other had not survived, threw their arms around each other. Towers of black smoke rose from the ruins, paling in the sky, as the ABC reporter choked on the mist of death. He excused himself and I knew the smell he was breathing at that moment. “Terrorists hit the U.S. embassy here . . . ,” he said.
Elizabeth and I sat red eyed in front of the television for hours, transfixed. Tearful family members of the victims gave emotional interviews and the stillness of my heart reached through space to commune with their pain.
A while later, the day found me burrowed in the sofa cushions, watching Elizabeth lovingly feed my daughter the soft baby food from a jar. The television was off. A persistent breeze lifted the thin curtains, fluttering a few moments of tranquility into that turbulent day. The neighbor’s rose vines had grown high and pretty outside the window. Across the room, Elizabeth cajoled baby laughter with a flying spoon and airplane sounds and I thought, as I always did, that I should be the one feeding my child. So, I tightened my jaw to keep her baby laughter from unearthing love in the gray stillness inside me. But I smiled anyway at the spectacle, discreetly filling my inner quietude with an irresistible, but secret, joy, and at that moment, the FBI, the CIA, and local police were surrounding our home.
I answered the doorbell, hoping to find Yousef standing there. But my heart dropped at the sight of their badges.
“Are you Amal Abulheja?”
“Yes, can I help you?”
“We’d like to have a word with you,” said a handsome blue-eyed man in a spotless dark suit. “If you don’t mind,” he added politely, professionally. They were all polite and professional, in fact. All six of them suddenly inside my house.
“My name is Jack O’Malley,” the agent began, but I interrupted him as that name smiled in my mind.
“I knew a Jack O’Malley once. He was from Dublin. Worked for the UN in a Palestinian refugee camp.”
“We need you to come with us,” he said dryly, a tone unbefitting his name.
I left Sara in Elizabeth’s care, voluntarily submitting to go with O’Malley for further questioning.
There, on a folding metal chair centered in a small bare police room, I sat subdued by curiosity and foreboding.
“My name is Jackson. Tom Jackson, ma’am. I have some questions,” said a corpulent man with an angry face. “Do you know this man?” he asked, sliding a photograph toward me on the table separating us.
I took the photo of Yousef with trembling hands. It showed only his face, in harsh details I had never before seen. The deep lines around his eyes held the pitiless resolve I had heard in his voice the last time we spoke. The upward-curling waxed tips of Yousef ’s mustache, where he had carried the memory of Jiddo Yehya, were cut off.
It was Yousef ’s face, but nowhere in his features could I find the brother I had known all my life.
“This is my brother,” I said, and I feared the answer to the question I could not utter:
Why do you ask?
O’Malley, who had been standing silently against the bare white wall, stepped forward, slowly leaning his weight on the table to meet my eyes with the fire in his. “We think he’s the terrorist who bombed the embassy in Beirut. What can you tell us?” He enunciated each jagged word with profound contempt.
I locked my jaw and threw away the keys. I didn’t believe them and my heart retreated to its inner tundra. But my senses exploded with awareness, heightening the experience of disjointed details in the room. The slight, almost imperceptible sway of the hanging light, the cheap smell of a man’s aftershave, the sniffle of someone with a cold, the shift of another’s weight, and the dirt particles grinding on the tile beneath his shoes. A wrinkled note, torn from a school notebook, landed before me. Yousef had written it and it had passed through the hands of many, including a CIA informant, making its way to me, for whom it was intended.
Forgive me, Amal. It is time they taste a small dose of the heaps they have fed us all our lives—Yousef.
For the next ten hours I answered their questions and their accusations. They may have been as drained as I was, but they remained unsatisfied with my answers. “Yes, I know he left the PLO . . . I don’t know why . . . Because he called me and told me . . . That’s all he told me . . . I don’t know anything about the Islamic Jihad group . . . I swear.”
He had done it all, they thought, the planning, the recruiting, and the bombing. “I don’t believe you,” I said.
“We don’t believe you, either.”
Ammo Mohammad arrived with his lawyer and I was, a day later, at last free to go.
I remained in the absolution of my inner darkness, but demons followed me there too, crowding the back alley of my days with a past too dense. I let Mohammad go on without me while I roamed the streets of Philadelphia, trailed by government agents who made no secret of their presence and thenceforth for many years rarely left me.
Rain fell and I welcomed the distraction of the splash of my boots on the pavement. The agents behind took cover beneath black umbrellas, maintaining only a few steps away from me until I stopped at a bar. It was a musty red-lit rectangular chamber with brick walls hoisting life-size photographs of Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. It was the bar on South Street where I had first tasted alcohol during my college years at Temple. Drenched, I found an empty stool at the far end of the bar and settled in. My hair was soaked with rain and my yellow T-shirt clung to my skin, revealing fine feminine contours on one side and the unsightly legacy of one Israeli soldier on the other. A string of Long Island iced teas cocooned me in a fog, where the only sound was the sermon of colliding ice cubes in my fat glass of liquor, which I raised once in recognition of the two trench-coated agents drinking tonic at the other end of the bar. Somewhere in my befogged state, I heard a voice ask in surprise: “Hey . . . Aren’t you that girl that used to live with Angela? What’s your name . . . Omar or something. Amy? No, Omar, right?”
It was Milton Dobbs. I recognized him immediately. Angela Haddad’s ex-husband. Without a word, I returned to the solace of my drink. He mumbled something to his friends and they all laughed.
Suddenly a clarity shattered my oblivion. Attention in the bar turned to the television screen. The music was turned down.
Everything seemed to give way to the voice of a reporter standing amid the wreckage of the U.S. embassy. “Rescue teams are still finding body parts,” said the broadcaster, and I watched the wretched scene, frightened that the FBI could be right. That the brother I loved with every part of me had done it. But then I thought about the brother I knew and was sure it could not have been him.
The two poker-faced agents watched me, not the reporter.
“Fucking terrorists!” Milton declared, puncturing an abscessed resentment inside me. From the corner of my eye I saw him turn in my direction as he shouted, “I think we ought to carpet-bomb the whole fucking place. Get rid of every last sand-nigger.”
Rage nominated me to hell.
I rose, blind with anger. The truth I knew swarmed over me like locusts, and fire screamed in my veins. No crevice of my being did not sting as I watched my arms pound fists into Milton, who floundered beneath me in shock, blood running from his nose and the flying white dress of Marilyn Monroe winging on the mural above us.
I was a small woman, with a frame bearing no more than 105 pounds, and in no time I was handcuffed, hearing the testimony of a bystander, and I stood there panting.
“. . . she flew like a . . . I mean it, officer. She literally flew off that-there barstool and knocked him clear off. Shit, I never seen a woman do that,” he told a police officer, pausing between thoughts to laugh and marvel at what he had witnessed.
A crowd gathered, but the men who had been trailing me all night still sat at the bar. Behind the faces circling Milton and me, I saw Jack O’Malley.
A humiliated Milton refused to press charges, dismissing me as “a psycho bitch.”
The police removed the handcuffs and left. The crowd thinned. And I don’t know why, but I walked up to Jack O’Malley and rested my head on his shoulder.
Looking at my swollen hand, he called to the bartender, “Can we get a bag of ice for the lady?”
My brother was a boy who walked the hills of Tulkarem and drank from the water springs in Qalquilia. He played soccer with the abandon of youth on the plains of Haifa and fed from the bosom of an ancient lineage in the land of his forefathers. We played backgammon, he and I. He was a man with a smile that melted many a Mediterranean heart. Truly, it was the most beautiful smile I have ever seen. He was denied, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, and exiled for the wish to possess himself and inherit the heritage bequeathed to him by history. His own heart he devoted to one woman only, for whom his grief shook the earth and spilled the blood of those who stood on it.
The picture from O’Malley’s pocket made its way to television screens across the country and my brother Yousef became the poster boy of all things vile and evil in the world.
Once, when I was four, Yousef tickled me so hard that I peed in my pants. When I was six, he spent days upon days teaching me how to blow a bubble with chewing gum. With the same patience, he taught me to whistle. In the sweetness of my youth, he and I walked together endless miles to the markets. We are captured in a photograph—the two of us digging into an orange in front of the Damascus Gate in the Old City before Israel conquered it. We ate figs, olives, and peaches straight from their trees. I spied on him while he read dirty magazines with his friends in our pitiful refugee camp. I read his love letters to Fatima and in his absence, mocked his sentimentality, like any bratty little sister would do.
While his unforgiving face peered out at the world from television screens, I found the picture I had taken the day Fatima gave birth in the Shatila refugee camp, now forgotten killing fields and mass graves. The lines around Yousef ’s eyes were all made of love. His expansive smile hung by the tips of his mustache, the meticulous legacy of Jiddo Yehya’s love, which my brother had waxed daily into his appearance. Yousef looked silly in that picture, frozen in his toothy grin with newly born Falasteen cradled in one arm and Fatima, the love of his life, sweetly leaning on his other shoulder.
1983
I SEE HER FACE IN everything I do. Everything I touch. Her tired blue dishdashe. I buy her many others, but she loves the blue one. I see her take it off so many times. Many times, I remove it for her. And I see her put it back on in the mornings. She doesn’t even know I watch her. My beautiful wife. Mother of my Falasteen and another from my loins; I’ll never know its name.
She pulls it down from the top to feed our daughter at her breast and I pull it up from the bottom to kiss her legs. “The Americans signed the paper,” she reminds me. “We’ll be safe. The Jews will not risk making a liar of their only supporter.”
I kiss her thigh and look upon our second child growing inside her. I can say I love her, but those careless, overused words would demean the immensity of what I feel. Fatima is the air I breathe. She is the reason for all promises. The embodiment of tenderness. She is love.
She holds me for a long time after I am called to go. “No matter how long it takes for us to be reunited, I’ll wait. I’ll wait for you until the end of time,” she says, her brown eyes filling with tears.
“Baba.” Falasteen kisses me.
I see Fatima standing there, waving good-bye. Falasteen holding on to her mother’s blue dishdashe.
I leave.
In a photo, that dishdashe is ripped and stained with blood. God, I beg of you, put me inside that photograph! At least to bury her with honor, with our children.
I no longer possess myself. I drown in a sorrow you cannot fathom, and a rage you cannot imagine presses upon my heart.
I am an Arab son. Born of Dalia and Hasan. My grandfather is Yehya Abulheja and my grandmother is Basima. I am the husband of Fatima, father of two. I am a haunted man, possessed now by their corpses. A storm brews inside me. I do not sleep and I cannot see the sun. Demonic wrath bubbles in my veins. May it lurk after I am gone. May you taste its vinegar.
I seek vengeance, nothing more. Nothing less. And I shall have it. And you shall see no mercy.