Mornings in Jenin (4 page)

* * *

Less than a day passed before Israeli soldiers reentered the village. The same men who had received the offering of food now marched through, pointing guns at the people who had fed them. Hasan, Darweesh, and other men were ordered to dig a mass grave for thirty fresh corpses. The village men were able to identify all but two of them. Hasan somberly wrote the names of his fallen friends and countrymen on the sleeve of his dishdashe as he hollowed the earth in such shock that he was unable to grieve. Al Fatiha. Dust to dust . . .

Stunned—
is this a dream
?—their nerves cracking, children crying, the villagers were tractable.

“Gather the valuables. Assemble by the eastern water well. Move! This is only temporary. Go to the well,” ordered a voice from a loudspeaker like a hidden god, distributing destinies. The sky still infinite. The sun unforgiving. Dalia put the gold in the chest pocket of her thobe and gathered the valuables as told, Ismael on the left hip, Yousef in the right hand.

“Mama, I want Baba to carry me,” Yousef pleaded.

“Go, habibi. Allah be with us all.” Dalia released his little hand and the boy jumped on his father.
Allah be with us all
.

The area around the well teemed with faces, all creased and twisted with alarm. But for the fright, Yehya thought they could have been gathered to prepare for the harvest.
The harvest,
he thought.

“Now what?” Haj Salem wondered.

Darweesh and his pregnant wife were the last to arrive. He approached stooped, one foot after the other, leading his heartbroken mare, Fatooma. Ganoosh, Darweesh’s delight and Fatooma’s lifelong companion, the horse that once had broken Dalia’s ankle, had been killed in the fighting and it had taken much persuasion to pull Fatooma away from the massive carcass of her mate.

Now what?

At the well, soldiers whipped their batons, herding the terrified crowd down the hill. A cart, weighed down with the belongings of several families, wobbled, churning up dirt. An old woman fell and someone picked her up. “Go, go!” yelled the loudspeaker god. Terror flew from people’s hearts and circled above like birds.
Chirp. Chirp
.

Dalia held Ismael to her chest and Hasan carried Yousef in one arm, a sack of hastily packed belongings in the other. Yehya lugged a basket of food on his back and, without water, the villagers stumbled toward the hills beneath a parched sky.

“Stop here,” said the loudspeaker god. “Bags here. Tomorrow you come collect them. Leave everything, jewelry and money. I shoot. Understand?”

Go. Stop. Understand? Return. Tomorrow. Safe
. Yehya could hold on to some words. Yousef held onto his father. Dalia on to Ismael, whose scar was still red but healing. Perhaps there was hope. So they dropped their belongings—the golden jewelry that had weighed Dalia down on her wedding day, food, clothes, and blankets. Basima’s pruning shears.
Why did I bring those?
Dalia wondered.

Darweesh stripped Fatooma of the sacks saddled on her back and laid their contents next to the gold and other valuables. “The horse! Leave the horse,” a soldier ordered. Not the loudspeaker god, but his disciple, surely.

“Please!” Darweesh had no pride left.

Fatooma was worth begging for, but the begging irritated the soldier. “Shut up!”

“Please!”

“Shut up!”

“Please.”

The soldier fired his pistol twice. One shot between Fatooma’s eyes, on her white streak. She fell instantly dead. The other through Darweesh’s chest. His pregnant wife, Basima’s niece who had been betrothed to Hasan, shrieked, screaming by her bleeding husband as people gathered to carry Darweesh a distance away, where someone produced a jar of honey to prevent infection and bandaged him with strips of his own clothing. The bullet lodged in Darweesh’s spine, condemning him to motionlessness, to a life plagued by unsightly bedsores, a life tormented by the burden of his wife’s cheerless fate, bound to a husband who lived only from the chest up. And even from the chest up, he lived on memories of horses and wind.

Panic rose from the shots and the birds of terror were supplanted by clouds that made Yehya hope for rain. It wasn’t the season yet, but his trees needed water. At times rain had been everything in Ein Hod, other times it was merely precious. Then he saw his son Darweesh and nothing had meaning. Rain be damned. Yehya dropped the basket from his back and began to cry for that strong boy of his, that impressive rider and beloved son.

Dalia still hadn’t caught up. The panicked throngs had separated her from Hasan, but she could still see the top of his kaffiyeh ahead of her. He was taller than most men; she’d always liked that.
God, what is happening?
The clouds passed as suddenly as they came. The sun stung like a scorpion. Dust was high, cactus low, and Dalia thought of water.

In an instant
.

One instant, six-month-old Ismael was at her chest, in her motherly arms. In the next, Ismael was gone.

An instant can crush a brain and change the course of life, the course of history. It was an infinitesimal flash of time that Dalia would revisit in her mind, over and over for many years, searching for some clue, some hint of what might have happened to her son. Even after she became lost in an eclipsed reality, she would search the fleeing crowd in her mind for Ismael.

“Ibni! Ibni!” My son, my son, Dalia screamed, her eyes bulging in search of her son. Dust at her face, cactus at her feet. “Ibni! Ibni!” She scanned the ground, looked up, and Hasan’s tall figure was not there. “Ibni! Ibni!” Some people tried to help her but gunshots tolled and Dalia was shoved along.
Is this a dream?
Nothing seemed real because it was unbelievable. She looked at her arms again to be sure.
Maybe he’s crawled into my thobe
. She felt her chest.
No Ismael
. Her son was gone.

Dalia stopped and so did time. She screamed like she hadn’t when her father burned her hand. A loud, penetrating, consuming, unworldly scream from a mother’s deepest agony. From the most profound desire to reverse time, just a few minutes. If there is a God, he heard Dalia’s wail. Hasan ran to her and searched the crowd as desperately as Dalia had. Afraid for his older child, Hasan held Yousef close as he looked for Ismael. Yousef squeezed his father tighter, afraid to speak, and the three of them at last made it to safety on Hasan’s strength and will, but without Ismael.

The villagers sat on the ground in the valley. The land was as beautiful and peaceful as it had always been. Trees and sky and hills and stone were unchanged and the villagers were dazed and quiet, except Dalia. She was mad with anguish, questioning people and uncovering other women’s babies in hope of revealing a boy with a scar down his right cheek, around his eye. She searched with frenzied foreboding, even though Yehya tried to reassure her that surely someone had picked up the child and surely it was only a matter of time before they would be reunited.
Surely,
Yehya knew,
you can’t hold on to words
.

Dalia spent the last of her energy on tears, replaying that instant, over and over and over. Little Yousef, not comprehending the sudden hell that had befallen the whole village, agreed to let go of his father and sat in his jiddo Yehya’s arms, both of them dazed and teary.

Hasan shuffled restlessly between his wounded brother, Darweesh; his inconsolable wife; his terrified son; and his bewildered father, until finally he succumbed to exhaustion and slept on the ground among merciless mosquitoes, a stone to rest his head. But not even sleep could assuage the inadequacy he felt. He had failed to protect his family. He could not provide assurance, nor could he bring Ismael back.

“Jiddo, can we go home now?” Yousef asked his grandfather.

Yehya could not lie, nor could he tell the truth. He kissed his grandson, pulled him closer, tighter, to his chest, and said, “Get some rest, ya ibni, get some rest now, ya habibi.”
My son, my beloved
.

They tried to go back the next day, but the guns behind them forbade a return home. For three days and two nights, they made their way up and down unforgiving hills, under the sun’s glare and the unseen but sure watch of snipers. A diabetic boy and his grandmother fell and died. One woman miscarried and the dehydrated bodies of two babies went limp in their mothers’ arms. Jenin was as far as they could go, and they rested wherever there was space among the flood of refugees converging from other villages. Residents of those towns helped them as much as they could, giving away their food, blankets, and water and fitting as many as possible into their homes in that time of crisis. Soon Jordan, Iraq, and Syria gave out a few tents, and a refugee camp sprang up in Jenin, where the villagers of Ein Hod could stand on the hills and look back at the homes to which they could never return.

So it was that eight centuries after its founding by a general of Saladin’s army in 1189 a.d., Ein Hod was cleared of its Palestinian children. Yehya tried to calculate the number of generations who had lived and died in that village and he came up with forty. It was a task made simple by the way Arabs name their children to tell the story of their genealogy, conferring five or six names from the child’s direct lineage, in proper order.

Thus Yehya tallied forty generations of living, now stolen. Forty generations of childbirth and funerals, weddings and dance, prayer and scraped knees. Forty generations of sin and charity, of cooking, toiling, and idling, of friendships and animosities and pacts, of rain and lovemaking. Forty generations with their imprinted memories, secrets, and scandals. All carried away by the notion of entitlement of another people, who would settle in the vacancy and proclaim it all—all that was left in the way of architecture, orchards, wells, flowers, and charm—as the heritage of Jewish foreigners arriving from Europe, Russia, the United States, and other corners of the globe.

In the sorrow of a history buried alive, the year 1948 in Palestine fell from the calendar into exile, ceasing to reckon the marching count of days, months, and years, instead becoming an infinite mist of one moment in history. The twelve months of that year rearranged themselves and swirled aimlessly in the heart of Palestine. The old folks of Ein Hod would die refugees in the camp, bequeathing to their heirs the large iron keys to their ancestral homes, the crumbling land registers issued by the Ottomans, the deeds from the British mandate, their memories and love of the land, and the dauntless will not to leave the spirit of forty generations trapped beneath the subversion of thieves.

FIVE

“Ibni! Ibni!”

1948

IN THE DAYS BEFORE the attack, in late July 1948, the hot winds of el Naqab swept toward Jerusalem as Israeli soldiers came to the village to consolidate the truce. September was only weeks away, and it always arrived with dry southern winds and baskets of rain.

Rain, just a hint of its coming, was a reminder of hope.
And the feast of the truce
, thought the villagers,
will mark a peaceful beginning
.

As soldiers of this Israel ate, the one named Moshe watched an Arab woman. At her legs, a small boy clung to her caftan. In one arm, an infant nestled to her chest and with her free hand, the Arab woman served lamb to Moshe and his comrades. In his soldier’s tan uniform, he thought how unfair it was that this Arab peasant should have the gift of children while his poor Jolanta, who had suffered the horrors of genocide, could not bear a child. It made him weep inside.

Moshe wanted Jolanta to be happy. Jolanta wanted a child. But Jolanta’s body had been ravaged by Nazis who had forced her to spend her late teens serving the physical appetites of the SS. That nightmare had saved her life but had left her barren. Having lost every member of her family in death camps, Jolanta had sailed alone to Palestine at the end of the Second World War. She knew nothing of Palestine or Palestinians, following only the lure of Zionism and the lush promises of milk and honey. She wanted refuge. She wanted to escape the memories of sweaty German men polluting her body, memories of depravity and memories of hunger. She wanted to escape the howls of death in her dreams, the extinguished songs of her mother and father, brother and sisters, the unending screams of dying Jews.

Moshe understood her pain. He saw it in the eyes of orphaned, widowed, devastated Jews arriving by the hundreds each day on the shores of Palestine. But Jolanta was special. So fragile and pretty. He fell in love with her and the two married within months of her arrival.

“Jolanta, you are safe now,” Moshe comforted his wife on their first night together.

“How can you be sure, Moshe?” she cried in his arms.

“We will live to see the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River with nothing but Jews.” He held her tighter. “Palestine will be ours. You will see. Together, we will raise a family. We are starting a new life. Go to sleep now. Dream of the children we will have, my darling. We will never be persecuted again.”

Moshe held Jolanta close and considered their plans to oust the British.

First the British
, he thought,
then the Arabs
.

He was right. Zionists succeeded in getting rid of the British and most of the Arabs. He and Jolanta saw the birth of Israel. Indeed, Moshe helped deliver the new state, a Jewish state rising from Europe’s ashes. Still, they could not conceive a child of their own.

Moshe left Ein Hod with his comrades, the image of the Arab woman and her children lingering in his mind. Jolanta had suffered so much; how could God deny her the elemental gift of motherhood while granting so many healthy children to Arabs, who were already so numerous? The injustice of it all solidified in him a resolve to take—by force if necessary—whatever was needed.

After the bombing the following day, in the crowd of fleeing villagers, he saw that Arab woman, her baby held tight to her chest, her defiant ankle bracelet as pretty as she.

Moshe made his way toward the crowd, coming up behind the Arab woman. Before he reached her, the throbbing crowd jostled the baby from her arms, into that fateful instant. In a flash, Moshe snatched the child, tucked it in his army sack, and kept moving without looking back. He heard the woman yell, “Ibni! Ibni!” and that made him believe that she had seen him take her baby.

But she had not. The crowd pushed on, more gunshots rang out, and the woman was shoved along.

The baby cried. Moshe could feel little kicks inside his sack as he made for the jeep, away from the eyes of his comrades. The Arabs had already moved on from the center of town. He had the idea to pacify the child with alcohol the soldiers had stashed to celebrate their imminent victory that evening in Ein Hod. Dripping gin into the baby’s mouth, Moshe noticed the scar on his face. It was still red and his eye was still swollen.

“The Arabs are gone!” shouted a soldier.

The inhabitants of Ein Hod were removed from the land. It was now time to celebrate and that was Moshe’s opportunity to get the baby out of sight.

“I left the liquor. I’ll be back,” Moshe yelled.

He secured the intoxicated child in the sack rustling about in the backseat of an army jeep as he sped toward the kibbutz where Jolanta was likely sleeping. Moshe thought she slept too much. Ate too little. Rarely smiled anymore.

Young life to care for will bring her back
.

The young life was Ismael, son of Dalia and Hasan, fellaheen from the Palestinian village of Ein Hod. Moshe did not know their names, nor would he or Jolanta, ever. The Arab woman’s face, and her scream of “Ibni, ibni,” would haunt Moshe’s years and the awful things he had done would give him no peace until the end. But for now, Moshe was propelled by love to steal a child. To chase people from their homes, he had been commissioned by an omnipotent edict.
A land without a people, for a people without a land
. He said it until he could have believed it, but for that Arab woman.

But for Dalia.

Jolanta’s face opened like a spring blossom. Her nurturing instincts overtook her depression, her ghosts, her misery. She held the precious child, half-drugged, dirty, and maimed. She enfolded him with her deepest yearnings, caring not that he was an Arab. That day she learned the first thing she ever knew about Arabs: that they circumcise their boys.

Jolanta fell in love. “He’s beautiful, Moshe.” She trembled with delight.

“He . . . the baby . . . his parents . . .” Moshe was not sure what he was starting to say and was grateful when Jolanta interrupted him.

“Stop. I don’t want to know anything. Just tell me, is he our son, Moshe?”

“Yes, my love. He needs a mother.”

“Then his name is David, in memory of my father,” Jolanta decided, and Moshe returned to Ein Hod with the liquor, happy. He felt complete.

First the British, then the Arabs
.

And now Jolanta had a child.

As the people of Ein Hod were marched into dispossession, Moshe and his comrades guarded and looted the newly emptied village. While Dalia lay heartbroken, delirious with the loss of Ismael, Jolanta rocked David to sleep. While Hasan tended to his family’s survival, Moshe sang in drunken revelry with his fellow soldiers. And while Yehya and the others moved in anguished steps away from their land, the usurpers sang “Hatikva” and shouted, “Long live Israel!”