Mornings in Jenin (30 page)
Is this how Yousef saw David? With inexplicable love?
Oh, David!
Brother
. I see you so clearly now. You have lived a stranger in your own skin. You searched for years to find me, never giving up when each lead to your family sent you to a grave or a morbid headline. Nowhere but in the temporary release of alcohol could your heart find repose. You searched for the one last hope that I, your sister, might traverse the abyss of your loneliness with the peculiar will of those who can find no place to belong. And when you found me, I did not come near enough. You confessed your shame and your sins, but I only perched myself on my own pain and sat in silence. Oh, brother! I feel a newness, the coming of rebirth. It will begin with your forgiveness. I will come to you when this is over. This will end soon.
The world cannot possibly let this go on
. The devastation here is beyond comprehension. Israel cannot possibly cover this up. It will not happen. The world will know at last. Things will change. I will come to you soon and beg your forgiveness. You’re my flesh and blood. You are the son of Hasan and Dalia. The grandchild of Yehya and Basima. Father of two. I want to speak to this soldier whose gun still points at me. But what is there to say? And would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?
I close my eyes, the wholeness of my life flickering, flashing, and taking form. I have made so many mistakes. I have not loved enough. I have not loved enough.
A voice screams, “Laaa aaaahh,” and I know it is Huda as I feel my eyes bulge in horror at the sight of my wandering daughter, exposed to snipers.
I forget about the soldier and rifle at my head.
I can fly. I swear it. I fly to her.
I throw myself on top of her, happy to be fat because my weight has pushed her down.
I am unbelievably happy. Euphoric because the snipers did not see her and we are safe on the ground. Low beneath the clouds of dust.
Somewhere in the distance, the muezzin begins to call the faithful to prayer. The adan comes from the sky like a bouquet of sad lilies. “Allaho akbar” reverberates over and into the putrid smell of this destruction. In its echo I can hear the shackled song of the Orient. I look into my daughter’s frightened eyes beneath me and am overcome with warmth. I am delirious with love for my daughter. My precious little girl.
Sara.
My life’s loveliest song.
My home.
I am too exhausted to move. I whisper to her, “I love you.”
I dream of growing old to the pitter-patter refrain of Majid’s and my grandchildren she might bear someday.
2002
AMAL WAS SHOT.
Even as she spilled from her own body and her eyes were emptied of her, Amal died without knowing death. She died with the joy of having saved her daughter’s life. With contented thoughts and with love. She died in a whisper, as if death itself was humbled by the unfolding of a wounded heart and did not want to spoil that tenderness by announcing its presence. As if death had sung for her a lullaby.
That day is whereupon Sara’s twenty years converge and rummage through its minutes in search of answers, of purpose, or of the will to fortify the memory of it. Or to fortify the mind from the memory of it.
The lazy haze of that day.
The abyss of their thirst.
The apocalyptic dust floating in the air like algae.
Sara did not know why her mother had gone out that day.
Had there really been a Red Crescent ambulance?
Sara’s eyes had just opened from inside a dream when she stepped through the door to reach her mother. She was dreaming of her violin recital, just before her tenth birthday, when she looked into the audience and saw her mother’s face soft in a mist of pride.
Do you remember, Mom?
But in her dream she played for an audience of only two, Amal and Majid, from whom came a resounding applause, swelling the theater of her dream. Majid’s face was hers. Sara had tried throughout her life to reconstruct her father’s features from her own reflection. “You look so much like him,” Amal once told her daughter.
Do you remember when you told me that, Mommy? I do. I was five
.
In her dream she bowed to them both. Suddenly, her grandparents Dalia and Hasan, her uncle Yousef, Fatima, cousin Falasteen, Great-Grandfather Yehya and Great-Grandmother Basima, Ein Hod and her great-uncle Darweesh’s horses, and all the faces and stories that had saturated Sara’s time with her mother in those days in Jenin. Her ancestors joined in the applause for her, the fruit of their seed. The auditorium rumbled with their laudation, dropping the lush landscape of Ein Hod into the background. The applause stepped up into thunder—
Was that the Red Crescent ambulance
?—cracking the center of her dream, wherein she saw her mother’s profile standing outside, in the reality seeping closer. So, she kept walking off the stage, toward Amal and Majid, whose face was no longer hers but that of an Israeli beneath a soldier’s helmet. She walked to her mother between the languid daintiness of her violin recital and the shocking devastation of Jenin. She was coming to Amal in the unsteadiness of a waking dream.
Then came the scream, and she was awake beneath her mother’s weight.
You are the prettiest of mothers.
Sara can never forget those last minutes of her mother’s life. At least ten minutes, maybe an hour, an eternity not long enough. It repeats in her mind and she records it in the letters she writes to her departed mother on a Web site for the world to see:
Your face is looking down at me. The words “I love you” are formed inside your half-parted lips, cracked from thirst. But no sound leaves you. I want to tell you then that I know you used to come into my room at night, when you thought I was sleeping, to put your arms around me. I know you loved me. I want to tell you this. Your breath was always full of love and it was full of sorrow. I want to tell you this, but I am terrified, because now I have the ultimate proof that you love me more than you love life. I wonder what you are thinking. I need your forgiveness. I need you, and I beg God not to take you. Not now. Not like this.
The sniper’s bullet, intended for Sara, burrowed in Amal’s flesh and drained her entrails of life in a pool of warm brown. It coated Sara’s dream, and every dream she had thereafter. Until the siege ended a week later, Sara was covered in her mother’s blood. The soldier who had held his gun to Amal pulled Sara from her mother’s lifeless arms. She fought him to stay. She asked him to shoot her. In her shock, she saw him surprised that she spoke English. As the soldier dragged Sara back to Huda’s home, he said to no one in shaking, broken English that he “cannot shoot anymore.”
The soldier gave Sara and Huda his thermos of water and two days later brought another and instructed them where to find “the woman’s” body when the camp “opens.” He had hidden Amal’s corpse beneath an uprooted olive sapling. He gave them food and enough to drink while the siege continued, but not enough to wash a mother’s blood from her daughter’s skin.
When the siege was lifted, reporters swarmed into the camp. Food and water followed and survivors set about their searches for each other, for their dead, their possessions, their will. Schoolbooks, unpaired shoes, utensils, the things of living scattered amid destroyed homes. Haj Salem did not survive. Fleeing neighbors had tried to get him out, but the advancing bulldozer would not stop and its tonnage decimated the old man’s house while he was still inside. When she heard this, Sara wept and wrote to her departed mother:
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother.
To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer.
Is this what it means to be Palestinian?
April, the month of flowers, forever holds Sara in her mother’s arms. It is the month when mother and daughter fell in love again and stayed up all night talking while a fury swirled outside the walls protecting them. It is the month when Amal at last found home in her daughter’s eyes. Her Web site, www.aprilblossoms.com, is where Sara records her memories of that month, the month from which all things come and to which all return. The month from which Sara loves and hates.
Sara will go back to Pennsylvania. This is certain, for she has already written too much and her name is on an Israeli list of “security threats.” There is no place to hide in this land, where even shadows are uprooted. But Sara’s heart will never leave Jenin.
Huda roamed the camp in a daze. That place where she was born, where she had been abused and terrorized, loved and cherished, had once again been destroyed. The remains of people’s lives protruded from the waves of ruin. Huda wandered, looking for something to find. A woman’s bathrobe still hanging on a bathroom wall, still standing amid the rubble. It was the bathrobe of her friend and neighbor. That was a find. But she left it there. A human hand, only fingers visible, jutted from the ground. Someone buried alive. She gingerly walked around the hand, murmuring the Fatiha for that person’s soul. A little girl’s shoe. Schoolbooks everywhere, torn and imprinted with tank treads. A doll. She picked it up. It had but one arm. Huda sat slowly on the ground, the one-armed doll in her hands. She looked at it. Looked hard. She felt the circular motion of time breeze through her heart and saw herself a girl again. It made her smile, ever so sadly. She ran her hand over the doll’s head, smoothing its matted hair in a stroke that replenished her tears. She cried with a small whimper, something like the sound of a heart that keeps breaking. And with grace, Huda closed her eyes in prayer:
Oh, Allah, help us all get through this life
.
Only at the burial did Huda scream. She wailed over the body of her childhood friend. It was the only body she could bury. Jamil was never found. She knew, as mothers know, that her son would be killed. But what mother’s heart can truly prepare for that? She just screamed. A primitive call into the ether. The love and death of children creasing and contorting her face. Huda dug her fingers into the earth over the graves, kneading the dirt as if she were fondling fate itself, grabbing fistfuls of her pain and heaving it into the air and onto her face. She sat there sprinkled with dirt, crying.
David was there too. He stood quietly next to Huda over the seven long rows of graves. They knew one another well, for it was Huda who had given David the names and rumors when he came looking for his family. But now they did not talk. No one spoke.
The few remaining men in Jenin dug the graves. Children looked on in curiosity as the shrouded bodies were lowered into the ground. Women heaved dirt from the graveside and slapped it on their own faces. They mourned with a primal trilling that the world did not witness.
David cried silently. He stood over his sister’s body, inside the torment of sobriety, smelling of the want of liquor. Though he made no sound, the force of his grief was strong, hovering over the graves like rain that cannot fall. His tears welled inside a loneliness that could not be drowned, rocked, or touched.
Ari did not stand. He crouched over Amal’s grave, sorrow on his back, and spoke to her softly. “Take this,” he whispered to her body, “I owe your father my life. Tell him I never had a better friend.” And Sara watched Ari drop the eighteen-pearled brooch over her mother’s shrouded form.
Mrs. Perlstein’s brooch was buried with you, Mother.
When the hours had accumulated on them exhaustion and thirst, the wailing gave way to the plaintive silence of tired grief. Ari limped into the crowd of mourners and prayed the Muslim prayer for the dead. They recited the Fatiha, dousing their faces in amen, cupped in their hands.
“Your grandfather is the one who taught me to pray,” Ari told Sara later.
“I wish I’d known him,” she said.
“I will tell you everything I remember. I knew your grandfather since he was a boy and was by his side when he married your grandmother Dalia. I can even tell you about your great-grandparents, Haj Yehya and Haje Basima. If you like, I can take you to Ein Hod and give you a tour of your origins. I have not been back there since I was a boy. It will be poetic to return there now with Hasan’s granddaughter. Indeed it will. You will do me a great favor to come. It will please your grandfather Hasan, wherever he is. I am indebted to him.”
Stories from Jenin trickled out into neighboring towns. The sight of a boy dangling from a metal post, headband and armbands marking him as a fighter. The story of an old man, a centenarian haj, who was crushed to death inside his bulldozed home. The one about the Palestinian-Amreekiyya who was killed protecting her daughter. This woman had survived an Israeli bullet in her youth and died by the one intended for her child. Her story reached far and wide. Her tale sent Muna Jalayta calling the Colombian Sisters, crying, “Amal was killed in Jenin.” That tale traveled abroad and put an ache in the heart of Elizabeth, who cried on her husband’s shoulders for the woman and her daughter whom they had helped and loved. It made Angela Haddad and Bo Bo mourn the passing of an old friend. But that story, too, quietly passed.
When Israel finally opened the camp, the UN never came. The American congressmen who tour suicide-bombing sites and express eternal allegiance to Israel never came. Jenin buried fifty-three bodies in a communal grave, Amal among them, but hundreds remained missing.
The official report of the United Nations, prepared by men who never visited Jenin and spoke to neither victim nor victimizer, concluded that no massacre had taken place. The conclusion was echoed in U.S. headlines: “
NO MASSACRE IN JENIN
.” “
ONLY MILITANTS KILLED IN JENIN, SAYS ISRAEL
.”
They murdered you and buried you in their headlines, Mother.
How do I forgive, Mother? How does Jenin forget? How does
one carry this burden? How does one live in a world that turns away from such injustice for so long? Is this what it means to be Palestinian, Mother?
Just around Sara’s heart, a silent scream has formed like a fog. It bears no words or definition. At times she thinks it is a political or humanitarian urgency to set the record straight. Other times it feels like anger. But in the shade of solitude, it is a wordless whisper from the depths of her, an unmistakable longing for just one more moment with Amal to answer her mother’s last words and say “I love you, too.”