Mornings in Jenin (24 page)
1983–1987
CONSTANT MOTION OF BOTH BODY and mind kept my life at a steady murmur. I rejoined the working society, stepping unobtrusively into the steady American flow. I returned to work in the pharmaceutical industry, leaving Sara in the care of Elizabeth most of the time.
I spent long hours there, expertly producing whatever the company asked of me. Strangely, the details of capitalism came easily to me. I felt no pressure when others scrambled at deadlines. Behind my icy eyes was a scorn at the utter unimportance of their bottom lines, the damaging rush to the next material benefit. I performed my job meticulously and easily.
I was a woman of few words and no friends. I was Amy. A name drained of meaning. Amal, long or short vowel, emptied of hope. Only practical language could pass the lump in my throat, formed there from love that meanders in the soot of a story that almost was. And anyway, what words can redeem a future disinherited of its time?
My life savored of ash and I lived with the perpetual silence of a song that has no voice. In my bitterness and fear, I felt as alone as loneliness dares to be.
Few of my co-workers liked me. They mistook my coldness for arrogance. These were the people who had seemed so self-assured and grand when I had first stepped foot in America many years earlier. I judged them harshly now, as they called me names behind my back, “ice queen” and “super bitch.” I ignored them, but I envied them the bliss of their small fears and the ease of their security.
I faced the world behind a thin layer of contempt. Only Sara was a threat to my hardness. She was the hearty vine, lovingly creeping along the stone of my character. The warm ember, forever aglow deep within. From the shadows of a heart more afraid of love than of death, I watched time stretch her bones and unfold her lovely skin over a young woman’s body. She was the brilliant color in the middle of the gray desolation of my world, the point where all my love, my history, and my pain met in a perfect blossom, like a flower growing from barren soil. God forgive me, the more she grew, the more I feared to be near her, to touch her. I was afraid to transmit my jaded frost to her, that my touch would be callused, the wrong complement to her soft, unconditional tenderness. So, I tended to the demands of motherhood, containing that burning love behind the cold walls of fear and long work hours.
Until she was four or so, Sara still came to me dripping with affectionate need. She would squiggle her little body in my lap, clinging to me for a story or a song, and from my clenched jaw I obliged. Her scent would seep through my skin to fan the flames of motherhood. By the end of the story or song, I’d feel tired of the fight to contain the heart that wanted nothing more in the world than to surround that perfect creature born of my body with its affection. I dreamed of it, imagining how I would sweep her up in my arms in loving play. How I would tickle her mercilessly, the way Elizabeth did, for the heart-filling pleasure of her laughter. I imagined the endless kisses I craved to plant in her memories. I never did, and eventually she stopped coming to me, constructing walls of her own to keep me out as well. Thus we lived behind our solid barriers, each craving the other’s love.
I had already been dismantled by the loss of everyone my heart had ever embraced and I would not allow the vulgar breath of my fate to spoil her promising life.
I can explain this, / but it would break the glass cover on your heart, / and there’s no fixing that.
So I watched her with a chronic ache as her wits and beauty unfurled in untouchable loveliness with each step she took through time.
I was a better mother during my daughter’s first few years, and as I look back, I think our house had something to do with that.
When Sara was still small, I bought a dilapidated old Victorian home in a northern Philadelphia suburb. I restored the house myself over the span of three years, filling every potentially idle moment with labor and motion.
There was something soothing, perhaps merely numbing, in the mindless strokes of painting the walls and the repetitive motions of sanding the wooden floors. I stripped the deposits of neglect from the doors and railings, uncovering the glory of oak’s raw grain and the love poured into it by some long-departed master carpenter. I picked crud from crevices, revealing the ornate details of someone’s architectural vision. I cleaned and I scrubbed and I mopped. I laid new tile and polished old floors. I hung new curtains and replaced broken glass, added light and recommissioned four fireplaces. In the frenzy of restoration, I unintentionally loosened the crusted layers of loss, clearing fear from a small patch of my heart. There, I held Sara, my small child, and rocked her at my breast, reading to her at dawn as my father had read to me in the long-ago days of love.
Each morning, I settled into a rocking chair that I had salvaged from someone’s garbage and read by the east-facing French doors as the sun made its way through the orange sky, rising behind a hundred-year-old maple tree in our backyard. I am not sure that Sara was ever aware of me carrying her out of bed every dawn while she was still deep in sleep because after I had read to her and finished my coffee, I’d return her to the warmth of her bed and head for work, leaving Elizabeth to Sara’s waking hours. I remember clearly the last time that I read to her at dawn.
It was the middle of her third year. She lay in a blanket on my lap as I reached into a pile of books, randomly retrieving Khalil Gibran’s
The Prophet
. Randomly again, I opened the book to this passage, which Majid and I had read the night we learned that our child grew in my womb.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and he bends you with his might that his arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves also the bow that is stable.
In the rise of the sun, as I read those words to my sleeping child, I heard her father’s voice in mine and felt his fingers run through my hair the night we read Gibran together. He leaned and kissed my lips, the apparitions of an expired love story. Majid was still here, running beneath my surface like an enchanted river from which I may never again drink, in which I may never again swim. Majid is the dream that never left me. The country they took away. The home in sight but always beyond reach.
The moment imbued me with yearning and I was defeated by the want to reverse time to the days of plenty. I held my breath and clenched my jaw to keep from remembering love or wanting it ever again, and I laid Sara in her bed with care now, turning to dress myself in the chill of
Amy
and a fine black suit before leaving for my job.
1987–1994
SOON, AN UPRISING CLIMBED from the ground to Palestinian hands, and the rocks they threw cracked the morbid glory of imperial victory. It was an intifada, a spontaneous combustion after twenty years of Israeli occupation. It was a shaking off of oppression and it spread through the hearts of Palestinians everywhere. They took to the streets hurling sticks and stones. Israel responded by breaking their bones with “might, force and beatings,” following the command of Yitzak Rabin, prime minister of Israel.
Here, Amal read. From Norman Finkelstein’s
The Rise and Fall of Palestine
.
Israeli press and human rights reports put flesh and blood on the data. The 1 April 1988 issue of
Hotam
reported the case of a ten-year-old beaten so black and blue during an army interrogation that he was left “looking like a steak.” The soldiers “weren’t bothered” even when they later learned that the boy was deaf, mute, and mentally retarded. The 13 July 1988 issue of
Koteret Rashit
reported the “disappearance of 25 children” and jail threats to their parents for “annoying” the army about the children’s whereabouts. The 19 August 1988 issue of
Hadashot
featured three photos of a blindfolded six-year-old in an army jeep. The caption reported that many children his age would be held in detention until “ransoms” of several hundred dollars were paid, and that, as they were carted away, the children often urinated in their pants “from fear.” Under the heading “Deliberate Murder,” the August 1989 bulletin for the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights reported that the Israeli army (apparently sharpshooters from “special units”) had targeted an “increasing” number of Palestinian children in leadership roles. “Carefully chosen,” the victim was usually shot in the head or heart and died almost instantaneously. Dr. Haim Gordon of the Israeli Association for Human Rights reported the case of an eight-year-old tortured by soldiers after refusing to reveal which of his friends had thrown stones. Stripped naked, hung by his legs and brutally beaten, the boy was then pushed to the edge of a rooftop before being released (cited in the January 1990 bulletin of the Israeli League). The 15 January 1990 issue of
Hadashot
reported the case of a thirteen-year-old who was thrown into detention after his fingers were deliberately broken and who was then left without any medical treatment or food because his father was unable to pay the ransom of 750 dollars. The 26 January 1990 issue of
Davar
reported the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who was beaten by a club-wielding policeman (“he even tried to push the club between my legs”) and then thrashed in prison for refusing to sign a confession. The 29 June 1990 issue of
Hotam
reported the case of a thirteen-year-old detainee who, refusing to supply incriminating evidence against his brother, was “smashed” in the face, had “bruise marks on his entire body,” was not allowed to drink or eat “for hours,” and was forced to “urinate and defecate in his pants.”
Reporting on the grisly fate of Palestinians as young as fourteen arrested on “suspicion of stone-throwing,” the 24 February 1992 issue of
Hadashot
quoted an inside source at the Hebron detention center:
“What happened there . . . was plain horror: They would break their clubs on the prisoners’ bodies, hit them in the genitals, tie a prisoner up on the cold floor and play soccer with him—literally kick and roll him around. Then they’d give him electric shocks, using the generator of a field telephone, and then push him out to stand for hours in the cold and rain . . . They would crush the prisoners . . . turning them into lumps of meat.”
Amal read these accounts, never knowing that the blindfolded six-year-old boy was Mansour, the youngest child of her friends Huda and Osama.
Mansour had been rambunctious and wide-eyed. His brothers had frequently teased him for being a mama’s boy and he had accepted the label with unabashed delight in Huda’s smiling arms. When a photographer took his photo, as he sobbed beneath the blindfold in the back of an army jeep, Mansour was praying for his mother to rescue him, and she, Huda, was going wild without her baby boy. The army held him for one week, the time it took Huda and Osama to raise the five hundred dollars’ ransom and determine Mansour’s location. No one ever knew what exactly happened to little Mansour over the course of that week, but when he was finally returned to his family, he looked no one in the eye. And he had lost the ability to speak.
* * *
There, Huda and son cloaked themselves in a habit of song at the doorstep of sleep, coaxing the night with melodies to open the doors of pleasant dreams. In the same family room, Osama, Amal—their firstborn—and the twins, Jamil and Jamal, would listen, allowing the lure of Huda’s voice to entice them too into slumber. These were the folk ballads of Palestine through which Huda came to lull her entire family to sleep during the years of that first intifada and for a time beyond that.
Oh, 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
Oh, flying bird in the high sky
Say “hello” to the dear sweet one
Your name, my soul, will stay in my mind
Written on my forehead between the eyes
Though they lived with the indignities of dispossession and military occupation, Huda sang with an unassailable freedom that comes only to those with unwavering faith. Huda and Osama still loved each other with the cravings of youth and the mercies of kittens. Their Amal was her father’s princess and her mother’s friend. She eventually married a Syrian and moved to Damascus with him. The twins, who came along in 1978, were strong, stubborn, inseparable, and protective of each other and their family.
At the other side of the world, Amal cradled her anguish like she should have her own child. She lived in a prison of her own making, a jail of ice to keep the world away. She gritted her teeth through much of her life, holding her breath as she moved through a cloud of silence. She prowled the trenches of that silence, that fear. She lost her way, lost some fundamental part of her makeup, but she knew not what it was, nor where or how to reclaim it. After a time of avoiding all news of Palestine, she now found herself reading everything there was to read about her homeland and her people, but she did not lift a pen to write a letter to Huda, nor to anyone else. She read as if each book were the piece of an elusive puzzle she needed to solve. She read to remember. But mostly, she read to punish herself with the intense guilt of having been spared.
And Huda sang. And she prayed.
“Please don’t throw rocks, yumma,” Huda begged Jamal and Jamil, her ten-year-old twins. “Don’t break my heart. Don’t break your father’s heart while he waits in their jails. They took him just like that. I don’t want them to take you too.”
But they threw rocks at Israeli tanks anyway, because boys will be boys and the young shall never respect the fragile breath holding them to life. They did it not for the sake of freedom, for such a concept was too precarious. They did it out of peer pressure, for the nature of small boys that attracts them to the adventures and trials of men. They threw rocks under an umbrella of abstract politics, which they did not understand, because they were bored with nothing left to do after Israel closed their schools.
Their hearts pounded with excitement, with the rush they felt when they whisked their own lives from the jaws of death chasing them so closely. Real-life cowboys and Indians. Some of their friends had already fallen by Israeli bullets. The stakes were great, making each day’s narrow escape a near-orgasmic high. This went on for two years during the intifada, ending when Jamal was shot at the age of twelve.
Jamil watched his twin brother fade from life as the other boys ran for cover. He was struck by death’s lack of drama. Its matter-of-factness. Its quiet authority. Jamal just closed his young eyes, expressionlessly, simply as if he were falling asleep, and never opened them again.
For Jamil, the loss of his twin came to define him. It pressurized into a temper that closed in on every tender spot, fossilizing his heart and squeezing bile from it. Anger drenched his vision. It coated his thoughts. It banished laughter, even lust, from his adolescence.
Huda still sang at night, tapering her melodies into a humming as she checked on each remaining member of her family: her children, Amal, Mansour, and Jamil. When she was sure they were sleeping, she prayed one more rukaa, a bonus for the day to curry favor with Allah, that he might protect her children, touch them with steadfastness, grace, and wisdom.
It was during these hours that Huda thought of Amal, wondering what had become of her lost friend.
Amal moved through time in the United States, each day like the one before, all of it forced and unreal. She hovered in the narrow junctions between madness, depression, love, and fury. Her life stood still in a room of fear, with whispering walls that laughed with Dalia’s delusions. That burned with Yousef ’s fury.
Or is it my fury?
That cried with Yousef ’s pain and shook with her own. Walls she wouldn’t look beyond, wherein swirled those angry and anguished voices. She disliked herself, emptied her world as much as possible and encrusted that emptiness with fear, on the lookout for pain, anger, or love that might break her fortress and fill the emptiness. She avoided her daughter, trying to douse that burning love, that dancing tenderness with its spangled promises. That sweet voice calling her, “Mommy, will you read to me like you did when I was a baby?” That heart-melting first-grade fantasy, “Mommy, it’s true. I heard it on the news. The tooth fairy is raising her prices.” She took all that in, unable to resist sweet indulgence. But she rarely gave back. Not for selfishness, but for the fear that the soot of her life might smudge the purity of her child. So it was for a perverted selflessness that she denied her daughter, and herself, the rhapsody of that magnificent love she felt to her core. Only at night, when Sara was sleeping, did she mercifully permit herself a whiff of love. Under the cover of night, she folded her arms over Sara, inhaling the soft fragrance of maternal love until the world seemed bearable again.
I can explain this, but it would break / the glass cover on your heart, / and there’s no fixing that
.
When Amal thought of Palestine, she thought of Huda. She thought of her uncle Darweesh, of Aunt Bahiya, Haj Salem, her cousins, and Jack O’Malley. And frequently she thought of that other possibility, Ismael, the brother that Yousef had sworn was still alive. A Jew named David.
More and more, David’s thoughts were of Amal, all that remained of his phantom family. Moshe had been the one who finally had told him, a dying man’s confession. Learning the truth of his origins so late in his life had indicted every thought, every love, every conviction that had built David into himself. The truth that put Moshe to rest at last was David’s undoing. To learn that his very existence was the fruit of Arab love; that his first breath had awaited him at the arch of an Arab woman’s womb; that his first milk had come from her breasts; and that the first to love him had been Arabs. This knowledge cast David into a gaping chasm between truth and lies, Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Jew.
“You were wrapped in a clean white blanket, close to your mother’s chest, when I first saw you,” Moshe had recalled. “The Arab woman served us food that day and I caught her eyes, briefly, before she hurriedly looked away. She hated me. Hated all of us. We were suddenly masters of her land, masters of her family’s fate, and we both knew it.”
“What did she look like?” David had asked his father.
“She was beautiful. I didn’t see that then because I despised the Arabs. But my mind could never let go of that glance when our eyes had met. Her face has tormented me all my life, son.”
Moshe’s confession had left David wondering if he had killed his own relatives in the wars he had fought for Israel. The truth encroached on his every day and spilled over into David’s embedded mistrust, even hatred, of Arabs. The two truths of one man, each as true as the other, opposite the other, repelling the other in an infinite struggle for David’s soul. The confession shook David to the core, unhinging his deepest beliefs.
The truth took another toll when he told his wife. The tug of his roots, nagging him to learn more, changed David. His wife could not bear his secret. That her husband had not been born a real Jew did not suit her upbringing nor her family’s sense of propriety.
They eventually divorced, splitting down the middle with ideological cleavers: their eldest son, Uri, a zealous Zionist, wanted nothing more to do with his father, standing squarely with his mother, while Jacob asked to live with his father. He was not prone to demagoguery or conflict and found David’s secret palatable, even interesting.
Jolanta gave her blessing for David to do whatever his heart commanded. Be he Jew or Gentile, Jolanta loved that boy. God only knows how much. That love had saved her once upon a time. Jolanta had done what neither Dalia nor Amal could do: she had transformed the energy of her pain into expressions of love, and David was the sole beneficiary.