Mornings in Jenin (25 page)

Jolanta had been remorseful, prepared to help David find the family of his birth. She had always found excuses where guilt arose, but the truth always returned, daring her to face it. Now she could and wanted to set the record straight. To embrace the woman who had given birth to her David and find reconciliation in the truth. For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed. And only then was Jolanta truly sure that David was, indeed, her son. The truth set her free and she found the urgent path of peace, where religion and history bowed before the sympathies of two mothers forever joined by their love for one boy.

“I want to meet them too. Let me help you search for your Palestinian family,” she asked her son, her eyes shimmering with remorse, resignation, and freedom.

Of course, by then Dalia had already passed away. Yousef had gone off to fight with the PLO and Amal was living in Pennsylvania. David and Jolanta searched together, but there was no one left to find. But David pressed on quietly, making telephone calls that led him from Huda to the orphanage to the Colombian Sisters to Muna Jalayta and others, until he was able to locate Amal Abulheja in a Philadelphia suburb.

Amal knew of the possibility of David’s existence. Yousef had been sure that Jewish soldier was Ismael, and Amal wondered if they would ever meet. Two decades later, when David at last contacted her, she felt that she had been waiting all those years for him to call.

THIRTY-NINE

The Telephone Call from David

2001

AMAL WAS PREPARING THE salad, cutting vegetables and looking up occasionally to check the clock as she waited for her daughter, Sara, to return home for dinner. Sara had only a few days left before she would be returning to school from winter break, and this would be their first night together since she got back. She had been busy volunteering for the local Amnesty International chapter and an activist group called Students for Justice in Palestine while catching up with old friends over her break. But in her heart, Amal understood the painful truth that her daughter wanted to avoid the still and quiet company of her rigid mother, even after having been away for nearly five months at college.

This evening, however, was theirs to share with only each other and Amal wondered if her daughter was feeling anxiety, dread, or, perchance, the same happiness that filled her own heart as she prepared dinner for the two of them. She had made Sara’s favorite dish, makloobeh, the Palestinian dish that never failed to remind her of Yousef. She pushed those thoughts aside and marveled instead at how the call of Palestine had come to live inside her American daughter.

Then, the telephone rang. Amal put the knife on the cutting board, wiped her hands, and checked the clock. It was six p.m. She picked up the telephone receiver, sure it must be Sara calling to tell her she was on her way.

“Hi, Sara,” she said, but by the silence on the other end she quickly realized it was not her daughter. “Hello?” she added.

“Hello. Is this Amal?” replied a male voice in accented English.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“I am David Avaram,” said the voice.

She did not recognize the name, but by the surname, Amal suspected this stranger was Israeli. “Do I know you?” she asked.

“No . . . I mean yes. Well, no, you don’t know me, but . . .”

She was about to hang up the phone, annoyed by the interruption since Sara was due home any minute now.

“Wait, please don’t hang up,” he said, perhaps sensing Amal’s intention to end the call. “I guess I wasn’t as prepared for this call as I thought.”

A memory rushed up in Amal’s mind from a buried past.
“He’s a Yahoodi they call David.”

Could it be?
Her hands began to shake and she nearly dropped the phone.

“I think you might know me as Ismael,” he said, but Amal could form no words for the storm of a past rising in her mind. “I am sorry to call like this. It’s just that . . . I have been looking for you for a long time. And I . . . now, I mean, I will . . . ,” he stammered, trying to find the words he had practiced for days before finally calling her.

Amal could not yet form words.

“This is unfair to you. Maybe it was a mistake to call like this. I’m sorry, Amal. I will go now,” he said, and Amal panicked.

“No!” she said, louder than she meant to. “Don’t go.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I know this is a shock, but I will be in the United States in two days and I was wondering . . .”

Amal heard the loud engine of Sara’s 1970 VW Beetle pull into the driveway and found herself quickly making plans to meet her long-lost brother, as if making plans to have lunch with a neighbor. They were both struck by the awkward practicality of those last moments on the phone. Flight information, date, time, her address, his cell phone number, her cell phone number.

“Thank you, Amal. Bye for now,” he said.

“Bye,” she answered, unsure what to call him.

She kept the phone to her ear, listened to the click ending the call, heard the front door of her house open, and watched the slender form of Sara walk in, reading something from her cell phone that was making her smile.

“Mom, sorry I’m late!” Sara called into the kitchen from the doorway where she stood sending a text message. She stopped to look toward the living room when she heard the phone fall, and she put her cell phone away upon seeing Amal.

“Mom, are you okay? Your face is really pale,” she said, hurrying into the living room. When she got close enough to see the tears on her mother’s face, Sara realized that she couldn’t remember ever having seen her mother cry before.

“Mom. What’s wrong?”

Amal looked at her daughter, smiled with so much love, and took Sara’s hand, gently pulling her to sit. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.

Although Sara was stunned to learn about David and hurt that her mother had kept so much from her for so many years, she was mostly intrigued. She was grateful to know, however belated. To know of her own family. To be invited, in a way, into the mysteries of her mother. She felt, above all, a rare closeness with her mother, the iron-willed woman who suddenly appeared vulnerable, almost fragile, to her.

“I have an Israeli uncle that you’ve never even met. He’s coming here. Wow. And I’m nearly nineteen years old and just finding out,” Sara stated, not accusingly.

“I’m sorry, Sara. I thought I could keep the past behind us. I knew, or at least suspected, that he was alive. When I was young, I overheard Yousef talking about Ismael and a man named David. But I never thought to learn more or to look for him.”

“Uncle Yousef also knew? Maybe he was trying to find him before he died in the car accident.”

The car accident
. How Amal had lied to her daughter.
God, how will she forgive me if I tell her everything I’ve held back?

“Mom? You okay? Where’d you go?”

“Habibti. There’s so much I have to tell you.” But Sara only heard the word
habibti
. When had her mother stopped calling her that? “When Yousef saw Ismael, he was a prisoner being tortured,” Amal said.

“Did Ismael torture him?” Sara asked.

“I don’t know. And I think we should call him David.” The thought that Ismael had tortured Yousef was harder to bear than if David had done it. “There was another incident when Yousef was badly beaten at a checkpoint not long before he left me in Jenin. I think it was David who beat him.”

Sara was silent for a moment, trying to process her mother’s words.
Ismael was David and David had beaten and maybe tortured Yousef. And at some point, Yousef left my mother in Jenin. Who did he leave her with? Was she alone?

“Mom, we don’t know this man. If he hurt Uncle Yousef then who knows what he could do.”

Amal turned to her daughter, put her hand to Sara’s head, and stroked her hair. “I have to meet him, habibti. I can’t not.”

FORTY

David and Me

2001

I HAD ONE HOUR to clean the house before David arrived. After some discussion, Sara decided she didn’t want to be home when he got there. “I think the two of you should have some time alone the first time you meet,” she said.

“So you’re satisfied now that he’s not going to kidnap and torture me?” I joked.

“Not entirely. That’s why I told our favorite nosy neighbor that you have a hot date tonight,” she said, winking at me. “That way I can be sure someone will keep a constant eye on you through the window.”

I smiled, absorbing something new and precious between us.

“I do want to meet him, though. So, I’ll be home around five-ish,” she said, pulling the door closed as she left.

Moments later, as I turned to tackle the cleaning, she burst back through the door. “Mom, please, can you give me a ride?” Her Beetle would not start.

When I got home, David was already there. He was early. The house was still a mess. My heart pounded and I heard myself exhale before stepping from the car into the chill of winter. David stood next to “Little Maple,” the tree I had planted in our front yard some eighteen years earlier to accompany “Old Maple,” the graceful giant that grew in the back.

We stared at one another before I approached him, both of us uneasy and unsure. He looked older than I had imagined. He looked like Yousef.

“Hello, Amal.”

“Hello . . . David.” He had not been Ismael for fifty-three years.

In the house now, I moved the vacuum cleaner out of the way, apologizing for the mess, as I always did with guests, even if I had spent hours cleaning the house.

He smiled slightly. “It’s okay. I don’t have much time. A car will arrive in a few hours to take me.”

“I didn’t realize you’d be leaving so early,” I answered, detesting my casual tone of voice but not sure of how to be or act, or what to say. We chatted in that awkwardness, empty conversation to patch up what felt like holes and unraveling expectations. His flight here had been uneventful except for the man next to him who had snored. That had been “a little uncomfortable,” and the directions I had given had been detailed enough. “Good.” He said he had been to New York a few times for work but that this was his first trip to Philadelphia. He liked what he had seen so far. I asked what he did for a living. “An engineer. Boring stuff.” Where did I work? “Drug company. Boring stuff.” We both had kids.
How about that?
“One daughter, Sara.” He had two boys, Uri and Jacob. Divorced. “Sorry to hear that.” He asked, “What about you?”
What about me?
“That’s for another time. Do you like Philadelphia?”
Damn, I already asked him that
.

He ran his hand slowly over his hair as if to wipe away the blasé front we were both putting on. This sort of perfunctory exchange wasn’t what he had expected.
Nor I
.

Looking around my house, David’s eyes rested on a restored drawing of the founders of Ein Hod, who had first settled there during the Byzantine empire. Legend had it that Saladin el Ayoub himself had granted the land to one of his generals as a reward for valor in battle. That general was my great-grandfather many times over, who had married three women and fathered most of the town.

“That’s our great-grandmother,” I said, pointing to a sepia photograph of a young woman wearing a shy smile and an embroidered thobe with a white scarf loosely framing her stunning face. “Her name was Salma Abulheja. Her beauty was legendary in Ein Hod, so girls in the village were often named after her,” I told him.

He looked on in silence at the proof of what Israelis already know, that their history is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians. The Europeans who came knew neither hummus nor falafel but later proclaimed them “authentic Jewish cuisine.” They claimed the villas of Qatamon as “old Jewish homes.” They had no old photographs or ancient drawings of their ancestry living on the land, loving it, and planting it. They arrived from foreign nations and uncovered coins in Palestine’s earth from the Canaanites, the Romans, the Ottomans, then sold them as their own “ancient Jewish artifacts.” They came to Jaffa and found oranges the size of watermelons and said, “Behold! The Jews are known for their oranges.” But those oranges were the culmination of centuries of Palestinian farmers perfecting the art of citrus growing.

David straightened the sag in his shoulders and cleared his throat. He knew the improvised history of modern Israel was not really his. The heritage that ran through his blood was vintage, yet somehow that, too, was not his. Fate had placed him somewhere between, where he belonged to neither.

“Can I get you something to drink?” I offered. “Do you like kahwe?”

“Ah . . . Arabic coffee. Yes, I would love some.”

Grateful for something to do, I darted into the kitchen.

There, I laid my hands gently on the counter, slowly pushed my weight on them. My jaw was taut.
Ismael, the helpless baby who got lost and haunted us, is here, all grown up
. I hadn’t made kahwe in a while.
Where are those demitasse silver cups?
I found everything.
What’s he doing?
I stood over the frothing kahwe, mixing it until it was the right viscosity.
Dalia taught me how to make it just right
. I poured a little of the light brown foam of kahwe into the traditional silver cups, then filled them with the darker coffee beneath.

“Here you are.” I served him kahwe by the fireplace, where he stood staring at the photograph I had snapped in Shatila in 1981. In the frame, Yousef is grinning. You can see his teeth. Fatima’s shy smile is formed from the deepest love. And Falasteen is swathed and nestled in her father’s arm.

David turned from that picture, eyes moist. A quiet spread before us, like a glass pane, beyond which you could see the air swirling with fifty-three displaced years.
Dalia gave all her children dark, round eyes that could fill endlessly with sadness
.

“I look just like him,” he said, shattering the glassy silence.

The scar snaked in a sinuous path down and around David’s eye. I imagined him a baby, scar healing but still red, held closely to Dalia’s chest.

“That is what your brother did when he first saw me. He just stared at my scar,” David said.

“His name was Yousef,” I said softly, indignantly. “Did you hurt him?”

My question riled ghosts of a nation, their torment unmitigated by justice or remembrance, coming to my side in flickering black and white movie reels. Images of my father holding me and reading from Khalil Gibran’s poetry in his deep voice, the soldier’s boots, the wheelbarrow, and the ethereal face of little Aisha; Sister Marianne and all the orphans; the explosions and the cries, the restless woe and howls of finished people. I submitted to the memories of a dense past and it filled me with a sadness that I wished were anger instead.

His head fell, as if he understood the aches of habitual injustice and chronic derelictions of exile. “Yes,” he said, his chin quivering.

I wanted to hate him, because I loved Yousef. But in David’s melancholy face, I could see the shadows of Mama’s eyes, Baba’s nose, and David’s own mistaken identity.

“Amal, do you have something stronger than kahwe? Liquor?”

“Beer.”

“That’ll be fine.”

I watched him drink. His manner resonated with profound loneliness. A solitude abetted by “something stronger than kahwe.” He had the sad dignity of a man resigned to eating alone at a table set for five. Not pitiful, not strong, just a man I hardly knew, with the incalculable capacity for error, goodness, love, hatred.
This, my brother
.

I sank into my sofa and, leaning back, noticed the sheet of dust over the coffee table. And with daring desperation, I longed to see Yousef, just once more.
What would he do here with Ismael and me?
Three siblings, emerged from the cradle of boundless tragedy. Each separated from the others but forever pursued by whispers torn from the consciousness of the others.

David was my brother and he was an Israeli who had fought for Israel’s wars. The contradiction could only be reconciled in his regret. But what I wanted revealed to me could have changed everything.

I pressed my palm over my own scar, felt the callus ruts and harsh furrows, and remembered the whoosh of the bullet that had plowed my abdomen. I needed to be in the belly of my memories, to hear what David would reveal.

* * *

“Was it you who tortured him when he was in prison?” Amal asked.

“No,” he answered quickly, as if surprised she would suspect such a thing.

“Then, it was you who beat him at the Bartaa checkpoint, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Why?”

David lowered his eyes and tried to explain the urge of power to impose itself for the sake of imposition. The elixir of unopposed force and the daredevil thrill of impunity.

“There is no reason or logic. I was twenty years old and they gave me total power over other human beings, Amal. I was angry. Somehow I knew he was connected to the secret I knew my parents harbored. And somewhere inside, I feared I might be an Arab. Rage and the impunity I knew I had throbbed in my arms when I was holding the rifle.” He looked at his empty glass. “May I have another?”

She poured, watching the beer stream into the glass, and she remembered the water she had poured that day for Yousef when he had returned bloody, carried by his friend Ameen.

“I was one of only a few people who knew why Yousef was at the checkpoint that day, when ordinarily he would have been working,” Amal began.

David looked up.

“He was on a lover’s errand. I know because I was the courier who shuttled Yousef ’s and Fatima’s love letters between Jenin and Bartaa.”

Yousef ’s and Fatima’s affair had grown years old, far beyond the ordinary courtship. Their initial infatuation succumbed to the warm tedium of Yousef ’s insistence on becoming a man worthy of Fatima. He delayed marriage until he could afford to provide adequately for her. When his studies were completed and he had accumulated a small hoard from his work as a teacher, Yousef asked his uncle Darweesh to stand in place of his father for the time-honored traditions of marriage. The day he faced David at the Bartaa checkpoint, Yousef had set out to prepare Fatima for the convoy that was to follow to ask for her hand.

“Huda always accompanied me on the letter deliveries to Fatima’s house and we split the profits. Yousef paid us quirshean, one quirsh each per delivery, and Fatima always sent us home with candy and homemade sweets,” Amal went on.

Their route to Bartaa was a tree-lined footpath of untamed sabr plants, intoxicating jasmine, and wild areej wafting along the path. It was on one of these trips that Amal and Huda found Warda, the one-armed doll of the Warda house.

The girls would gambol along, pausing to pluck fruit and dates from their vines, tuck flowers in their belts, and gossip and argue as young girls do. Nearly halfway, they rested under “the twins,” a pair of cedar trees with enormous trunks, the only survivors of a family of saplings imported from Lebanon some three hundred years earlier.

Under “the twins” or the olive trees behind the Warda house, Amal violated her brother’s and Fatima’s trust by reading their letters.

She and Huda acted out love scenes, as they imagined them to be.

Amal: Oh, Fatima, I love you.

Huda: Oh, Yousef, I love you more.

Amal: No, Fatima, I worship you.

Such sentimentality made them laugh, until the letters became heavy with indecipherable want and an intimacy they dared not fathom. Once, saturated with curiosity, Amal and Huda ventured to act out the content of a particular letter. Startled by the scene, they pulled themselves apart quicker than they had plunged their tongues into each other’s mouths.

“Karaf!” Amal and Huda wallowed in mutual repulsion. “Gross!”

They stopped reading the letters after that, believing that they had been fooled, that the letter they had acted out had been written to pay them back for their nosiness. Thus, Amal and Huda turned their attention to more urgent matters, putting details of the ever-popular Warda house in order and collecting their letter-delivery fees.

After carrying a beaten and battered Yousef home from the checkpoint, Ameen had remained with Yousef until very late in the evening. Dalia had sat nearby, meandering the unseen labyrinths of a deconstructed reality and embroidering with Um Abdallah on the balcony that leaned under their weight and shaded the front entrance of their home.

Though their world had become restricted by soldiers, Amal and Huda had retained the habits of girlhood—playing hopscotch in the alleyways, indulging in the card games they invented during the claustrophobic curfews, and attempting that elusive somersault. Their inclination for snooping also had returned, and the day Yousef lay recovering from the beating at the checkpoint, Amal and Huda paused their play intermittently to spy on him and Ameen from the south window. They could see clearly the lewd magazine inside the covers of a benign hardback in Ameen’s hands.