Mornings in Jenin (29 page)

“Khalto Amal,” Jamil said flatly, “after whom my sister was named,” stating the obvious. He did not allow his eyes another glimpse of that oasis standing next to me.

Instead, I watched his presence pass over my daughter’s skin, like a caress. Like an apology, a regret before the end. A rite of the dead.

Jamil reached to the only wall hanging, brought the frame close to his face, kissed its glass, and returned the photograph of Jamal, his twin, forever twelve years old.

Then, Jamil was gone.

At 2
A.M.
came the roar of rolling tanks, like the purr of a beastly cat. We held each other. The metal teapot, cooled by the night, sat where it was left. Mansour pulled close into the arms of his silence. He kept drawing. Huda faced her mat toward Mecca and prayed quietly.

In time, other sounds came. The raspy shelling of tanks. The shrill of helicopter missiles. The thunder of airplane bombs. The clap of explosions. The cacophony of military power was parceled amid a devious quiet, where the
ti-ti-ti-ti
of critters leaving their holes and cries of small children could be heard as soldiers went from home to home. The sounds of death and destruction rose and fell, lasting nine days, which we spent in the innermost, lowermost room. A bigger kitchen hole.

“Remember?” Huda turned to me.

“I remember.”

We knew homes and buildings were being leveled nearby. The scream of bulldozers, like an orgy of dragons, made the earth quake beneath us, and we devised an exit plan for if and when they came toward us. Huda wrapped a small package of family photos along with her family UN identification cards, tucking the small bundle into the chest pocket of her thobe. Sara and I kept our American passports in our respective brassieres. All of us kept our shoes on.

Through it all, I held my daughter close in a private dream, falling in love with her as if I had just given birth to her once more. We talked for nine days, dismantling the unuttered words of a lifetime. As death rained from the sky and bullets sprayed the outer walls of Huda’s home, Sara and I peeled back the pain and bitterness we each had held so dear and found our shared longing for Majid despite, or perhaps because of, the terror we felt.

“I wanted so much to know. To talk about him with you, you know. Why wouldn’t you even talk about him?” Tears quivered in the rims of her eyes. Majid’s eyes. Infinite black spheres; a lazy arch in the corners and one brow that could lift itself away, like a smile. The feminine version of Majid in our daughter’s face. In the dust of memory I could find nothing whole, only pieces of him. A particular wrinkle. A scar. Cowlick at the base of his neck. The sky and the Mediterranean blending into a single hue. But I could conjure his scent, indeed. The dew of his sweat after labor and after love. After so many years, Majid was the scent of blue.

“I’m sorry, Sara.” I opened my hands and unhinged my jaw. “I was afraid . . . so afraid of what I might feel.” I put my heart in my open hands. “Do you remember what it was like when the Twin Towers fell on September eleventh?”

Her brow lifted. “Yes. I remember you stayed in your room all day the next day and didn’t go into work. I thought you took it pretty hard and I’ll admit I didn’t understand. What does that have to do with my father?”

And there was Yousef ’s voice, oppressed and sad and angry and impotent coming through telephone wires of twenty years ago. “Your father was killed the same way. Israel bombed our apartment building the night before he was going to leave Beirut to join us.” There, it came through my heart and my lips. There was no fury or rage or despair. Just a sweet pain. A sadness I could drape over my heart, in my open hands, to keep it warm.

“Oh, God!” She held me dear, tightly so.

“I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children’s loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity. And there was me, in the mirror with the disparate worth of my husband’s life. The disdain for my loss. FBI always there, somewhere. The past always loomed. But on September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father’s life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.”

Sara was crying. Guilt, because my behavior then had irritated her. “Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I was so insensitive. I didn’t understand.”

I looked at my daughter and knew, as I know the sun will set and rise again, that I loved her with a longing and depth more profound than time, more profound than God.

“Shhhh, habibti. You don’t need to explain anything. I wasn’t a very good mother. I should have told you. We should have talked like this years ago. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

Activity outside made us all jump, Huda from her sleep. I was eleven again in the kitchen hole. Huddling again, praying, Mansour drawing. We held on, checked our papers, passports. Shoes tied, ready to run. Stretched our legs; a cramp could be fatal. But we didn’t stand up; bullets could come through the windows. Huddle, huddle in the innermost lowerermost rooms. Fear flying from hearts like little birdies in the air.
Chirp, chirp
.

Sara was frightened beyond anything I’d ever seen in her face. Even the color of her face retreated and hid. I rubbed back the hair from her forehead, kissed it. I kissed her face. Kissed away the fear. Until it was calm again.

Bullets and tanks and helicopters went back to their bullet and tank and helicopter world. Quiet, and so were we. An occasional scream or a cry. Soldiers inspecting their work, perhaps. Quiet, but for the chirping of invisible birdies.

Now it had been quiet long enough. We exhaled, blowing the birdies into a corner, and began to whisper. Then talk.

“Was it love at first sight? When did you fall in love with my father?” Sara asked, but I could not define a moment. I had a sense that I had always loved Majid. How can one find the first moment of love? When, in what instant, does the night’s dark sky become blue?

“I don’t know, habibti,” I answered honestly, but her expression demanded something else. A story.

“Well, on that ride from the airport. After we got to the camp, your father got out of his Fiat with candy falling from his grip for the dozens of children gathering around him. It was such an endearing sight . . .” And the memory of my husband, of blue and love and loss, settled gently in my throat. Tears fell from my eyes. Mercifully, they fell.

“Tell me more, Mom.”

The quiet didn’t last. We heard more explosions now followed by intermittent fire.

The terror raging around the walls of Huda’s small shack pushed us together into the wonderful bonds of mother and daughter and friendship.

“You know,” Huda began, “Fatima wrote to me about you and Majid. She seemed so happy.” Then Huda let her eyes fall to the floor. “But I didn’t get the letter until many months later, until . . . after . . .”

“Do you still have the letter?”

“Of course. It’s right here, with all my important papers,” Huda said, pulling the bundle from the chest pocket of her thobe. She removed a folded piece of orange paper and I remembered the pad of orange stationery that Fatima had kept in her kitchen pantry, a detail tucked in my memories of Lebanon.

I unfolded it and began to read how Falasteen was getting so big. That Yousef worked and worried too much and how happy they were to have me with them in Lebanon. The letter spoke of Majid and me, and Fatima praised her own matchmaking skills, taking full credit in her letter for our marriage. She had just received the news of her second pregnancy and she had written, “You’re not going to believe this, but Amal is pregnant also. She’s due in September, too!” She wrote how much she missed Huda and missed her family in Palestine. “Someday,” she said, closing her letter.

Inshalla. Ya Rabby, we will be together someday. All of us.
Yousef, me and the kids, Amal and Majid with their kids, you and Osama with your kids. I dream of this day.

Love,

Fatima

On the seventh day, Mansour was taken away. Soldiers blew open the lock on the metal door, hemorrhaging through. While two soldiers ransacked the house, another demanded Mansour strip to his underwear. We looked away in a futile attempt to save him some dignity. They blindfolded and handcuffed him. And Mansour’s silence draped itself over him like an overcoat as they took him, leaving his drawings littering his home.

“Allah be with you, son,” Huda said. Not crying. She had run out of tears, I think. “Mansour will come back. They will beat him up. They always do. He always comes back,” she said, mostly to herself.

Always
is a good word to believe in.

We collected Mansour’s art in a small pile of papers. It was the world as he saw it. Huda praying, Sara resting in my arms, Jamil victorious in battle, Sara’s profile, all of us bent over a small meal with the angel of death standing guard over us.

Precious little water remained and we were nearly out of bread.
What had happened?
We dared not remove the sandbags over the window to look out and were too afraid to move near the mangled metal door, which offered a lookout hole.

But it was calm now. It had been calm for a while.
Soon, they will ride with loudspeakers allowing us to leave our homes
. But they did not and we ran out of water and finished the bread. We thought surely someone would come soon to clear the dead, whose unseen bodies forced us to breathe through cloth soaked in rosewater.

The odor became unbearable. The markings we made on the wall indicated that two days had passed since the bombing had stopped, but we could see nothing through the hole in the metal door. An infinite cloud of dust and debris of demolished homes hovered in the air.

We licked the last drops of rosewater, breaking the bottle to get at the last bit, and we slept. “The world cannot possibly let this go on,” I said to Huda.

“The world?” Huda asked sarcastically, rhetorically, and uncharacteristically, deeply bitter. “Since when does ‘the world’ give a goddamn about us? You have been away too long, Amal. Go to sleep. You sound too much like an Amreekiyya.” With that, she and her wisdom pulled up the cloth over her nose and closed her eyes. The next dawn, the sun rose over the haze of a decimated refugee camp. I heard the sound of a large vehicle.
A Red Crescent ambulance
. I left a note that I would return with supplies from the aid truck, and I stepped out, covering my face from the assault of light and dust. I walked on into an eerie stillness, like the quiet of a graveyard where the imperceptible sounds of vanished souls and banished little histories crawled up my feet from the earth like ants.

I thought it was over. I thought the Israelis were gone. It had been quiet. I thought the car I heard was a rescue vehicle, an aid truck.

I was wrong.

It was an Israeli military truck. I saw it stopped ahead in a prairie of rubble where hundreds of homes had stood only days before. The bed of the truck was weighed down with lifeless bodies stacked on top of one another, like lumber. The truck had stopped to remove the mangled body of a Palestinian hanging dead on a protruding metal stake on the side of a partially demolished building. Its head was hugged around by a black-and-white checkered headband, and around its arms by two communist red armbands. Symbols made hollow by death in that truck of lumber.

The weight of my mistake fell on me. Cautiously, moving only my eyes, I looked upward and saw the snipers.
The Jews are still here
.

Click. Click.

I turned in horror toward the shrill of metal switching on itself and felt the muzzle of a rifle at my forehead before I saw the young face of the soldier standing before me.

The moment made a space for us, pushing the dust away, and fixed us together.

Here we are now. I see his contact lenses swimming in his eyes and sweat bubbling on his forehead.

I feel an inexplicable serenity. Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.

But he does not shoot.

He blinks hard. And a solitary drop of sweat travels from his brow. Down the side of his face. I watch it fall and note his smooth skin, still too young to need a regular shave.

The power he holds over life is a staggering burden for so young a man. He knows it and wants it lifted. He is too handsome not to have a girlfriend nervously waiting for his return. He would rather be with her than with his conscience. With his burden or with me.

I know he has killed before. He knows I know. But he has never seen his victim’s face. My eyes, soft with a mother’s love and a dead woman’s calm, weigh him down with his own power and I think he will cry. Not now. Later. When he is face-to-face with his dreams and his future.

I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power. For an instant, I think he could be my nephew. But no. Uri has no doubts of his duty to kill for Israel. This soldier is not my nephew.

Strange, strange
, he is handsome and I, loving.