Mornings in Jenin (6 page)

Yehya shaved. He dressed himself, going through the quiet ritual he had employed weeks earlier. But this time, he performed the rites of the forbidden Return with the deliberate strokes of experience. Yousef sat by his side in the sunshine, watching the slow motions of the razor along his grandfather’s jawline, dazzled by the sun’s dance along the blade. He observed the dirty white foam in the rinse cup, the spots on Yehya’s hands, and the dirt beneath his nails. And he committed to memory the precision with which Yehya trimmed his salty black mustache and waxed its tips to perfect curve and symmetry. The mantle of a patriarch.

No one knew exactly when Yehya died. But by the time the Red Crescent was able to retrieve his corpse from the Israeli authorities, Dalia had miscarried again. Everyone in the camp agreed that Yehya had known that when he again set foot outside the boundaries of that eternal 1948, he would be gone forever. Haj Salem was sure that Yehya had gone back to die where he was supposed to die, and when people spoke of Yehya’s passing, they said he had died from the malady of a broken heart.

The actual cause of death was a gunshot wound. Ein Hod was being settled by Jewish artists from France and was gaining a reputation as a secluded paradise. Yehya had been spotted on his first trip by one of the Jewish settlers, and when he returned, waiting soldiers had shot him for trespassing.

When the family cleaned Yehya’s body for burial, they found three olives in his hand and some figs in his pockets. In death, Yehya’s face wore a smile, and that was proof to everyone that he had gone happily to the heaven of martyrs. So, from their tears, the people of Jenin’s shanty camp mourned Yehya’s death with a celebration of his life and his final bravery and love of the land. Jack O’Malley gave his staff the day off and they all joined the funeral procession.

In that somber celebratory crowd of mourners, Hasan walked in silence, carrying the shrouded body of his father at one corner while his brother Darweesh wheeled himself alongside in his chair. No one noticed the trauma in Yousef ’s young face during the funeral, and no one could sleep that night. Yehya’s death unveiled a truth that seized the night and made it heave with restlessness. How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence? Somehow that raw question had not previously penetrated the consciousness of the refugees who had become confused in the rank eternity of waiting, pining at abstract international resolutions, resistance, and struggle. But that basic axiom of their condition sprang to the surface as they lowered Yehya’s body into the ground, and night brought them no sleep.

The next morning, the refugees rose from their agitation to the realization that they were slowly being erased from the world, from its history and from its future. The men and women held separate councils, from which a fledgling command began to emerge. In nearly every matter, Hasan was sought out because he was the most learned among them, and the tasks of writing letters and negotiating with UN officials for basic necessities were assigned to his capable hands.

Even their Palestinian countrymen, in the yet-unconquered West Bank towns, looked down on them as “refugees.”

“If we must be refugees, we will not live like dogs,” it was declared.

That straightening of their spines is what Yehya’s death brought to the camp. A fever of pride enveloped Jenin and a campaign was organized to institutionalize education, especially the girls’ school. Within one year, the community of refugees built another mosque and three schools, and Hasan played a central but unobtrusive role in it all, keeping to the periphery of day-to-day life but still busily drafting letters and documents. He would rise before the sun, pray the first salat, and read, his free hand alternating between a cup of coffee and his pipe packed with honey apple tobacco. Then he would leave for his job before his family awoke, and from there, he would go to the hills with his books, returning after his family was already sleeping. He was too ashamed of the pittance pay he brought home. Ashamed to return daily without Ismael. Some days he put his books aside to work on cars, an interest imparted to him by Ari Perlstein and a hobby that turned into a garage business, eventually earning enough money to send Yousef to college.

For Yousef, the sudden gone-forever of his grandfather made his heart curl around itself in sadness. From a distance, he watched the subdued games of backgammon between Haj Salem and Jack O’Malley, his jiddo’s empty chair between them.

“Mama—” Yousef said, trying to hold back tears because Dalia insisted on strength. He was sitting at her feet, toying with her remaining ankle bracelet.
Mama jingles when she walks
.

“—I want Jiddo back.”

He hadn’t known what he was going to say until he said it. Dalia put her hand on her son’s head. She could hardly believe how much he had grown. Counting the coins on her ankle bracelet, Yousef liked the way it moved between his fingers.
One, two, three, four . . . eighteen gold coins
. Dalia knew she had neglected Yousef since Ismael had disappeared.
I’m doing the best I can, I’m trying, God, I am. Ismael would have been five years old by now. I wonder what he would look like.

As Dalia caressed Yousef ’s hair away from his forehead, he wondered if she was going to speak. Or if he had disappointed her by being so silly as to want someone to return from the dead.

I’m going to learn to play the nye
, Yousef decided, and left, wordlessly.

SEVEN

Amal Is Born

1955

FOUR YEARS AFTER THE UN funded the adobe box that Hasan built for his family, a UN-sponsored school for boys was established in Jenin. Jack O’Malley offered him a teaching post, but Hasan refused.

“There are others who have official credentials to teach. It would not be right for me to have the job over them,” Hasan insisted. Instead, he went to work there as a janitor.

On the occasion of his first pay, Hasan presented Dalia with gifts, which she accepted with new delight, splintering the rigidity of her mourning. And nine months later, their third child, Amal, was born into the heat of July 1955.

Until this birth, Dalia still wore a cloak of bereavement for Ismael, sheathing herself in black grief that reached to her wrists and ankles. With the good riddance of the damp tent, her husband’s new job, and the bathroom and kitchen that were being built to replace the buckets and wash pans, the waiting for things to go back to normal became a tolerable interim fate for Dalia. She traded her tired black scarf for the vibrant new white one made of real silk. The birth of a new child was said even to have restored a glimpse, however brief, of the spirited gypsy she had once been. Though Dalia’s spirit had long since been smothered, she could see its reincarnation in little Amal, like a whirlwind of life taking form in her daughter.

Soon Dalia recognized the quick curiosity in her growing child, whose remote black eyes seemed to have no bottom. The girl had an aspect of sorcery, as if she had materialized from the charms of alchemy and Bedouin poetry. She behaved as if the world belonged to her, and once Dalia observed her naughty daughter pushing other small children into a shadowed alley, yelling, “That’s my father’s sun, get away!”

It was not long before the child was compelled to create imaginary friends who could tolerate her wild nature—until, that is, she found another friendless soul, named Huda.

So passive and yielding was Huda’s nature that it awakened an instinct of compassion in little Amal. They were an odd pair. But they were friends, and few in the camp ever saw one without the other.

Well into her elementary school days, Amal remained stubborn and capricious except with her father, whom she rarely saw because of the long hours he spent at work. He seemed to her like a god. When she approached him, she did so with worshipful eyes that reached to her father’s depths. And when Hasan held his little girl, he did so with profound tenderness. Often, before the child took possession of her father, she would turn devilish eyes toward her mother, for Dalia was competition for Hasan’s affection.

Dalia could not find the will to discipline this child physically, as she had Yousef. She left Amal to her own untamed whims, watching her daughter as if surveying a burning sensibility that had left her years ago and returned tenfold in her child. Fate had been perverse to do such a thing, for Dalia had no defenses against raw vitality.

Dalia learned to be a stoic mother, communicating the demands and tenders of motherhood with the various tempers of silence. Against this quiet detachment, the girl offered fits and petulance, mixed with bursts of kisses and feverish need meant to provoke her mother. Dalia’s love found its expression during the child’s sleep. Then she stroked her daughter’s hair, loved her endlessly with the kisses she withheld during the child’s waking hours.

II.

EL NAKSA

(the disaster)

EIGHT

As Big as the Ocean and All Its Fishes

1960–1963

I SPENT MUCH TIME IN my youth trying to imagine Mama as Dalia, the Bedouin who once stole a horse, who bred roses and whose steps jingled. The mother I knew was a stout woman, imposing and severe, who soldiered all day at cleaning, cooking, baking, and embroidering thobes. Several times each week, she was called to deliver a baby. As with everything else she did, she performed midwifery with cool efficiency and detached nerve.

I was eight years old when Mama first let me help her deliver a baby.

“This is a very important job. You must be very serious, Amal,” she said, and proceeded with her cleansing ritual before leaving.

“Wudu and salat. Do it with me,” she instructed.

We passed the homemade soap between us. I watched her, imitating every detail, every motion. The splashing of the face with water, the rinsing of the hands, elbows, feet. Mumbled affirmations of faith in Allah. I moved as her mirror image. We washed and prayed, then she braided my hair. Before we left she held her special scissors over the babboor’s open flame and wrapped it in cloth “in the name of Allah, most Merciful and Forgiving.”

At the expectant woman’s home, I was as Mama was, deliberate and grave. I handed her the towels, stood by with the scissors, and held my nerves (and the food in my stomach) because she warned me, “Don’t be weak and don’t get sick.” Stern as steel. “Whatever you feel, keep it inside.”

I remember that day well. The slow strokes of the comb traveling in Mama’s hand from the top of my head to the tips of my long black hair. Approval in her face when I anticipated a need for more towels before her cue. Imparting skills and forestalling weakness were the ways Dalia loved. Everything else, the hugs and kisses I so craved, she held with the clench of her jaw and the grip that rubbed itself in her right palm.
Whatever you feel, keep it inside
.

That evening she let me and Huda, my best friend, sleep on the flat rooftop.

“Thank you, Mama.” “Thank you, Um Yousef,” we said excitedly.

She didn’t answer us, just pulled the shades over her heart and went on with her evening cleaning. From the roof that night, Huda and I watched Mama wait for Baba to return from the garage. She walked around with a broom in her hand, Um Kalthoom singing from the radio, and she swept the dust at the threshold until there was nothing but moonlight to sweep.

Mama never danced at weddings and rarely visited friends. Once, I awoke far into the night and found her tenderly stroking my hair. She kissed me then, one of a few precious kisses perched in my mind, and said, “Go back to sleep, ya binti.”

My early years in Jenin’s refugee camp are metered by such discoveries. Like the time when I was four and I saw Yousef ’s penis. He was getting dressed and didn’t notice me watching. For days, I thought about it, inspecting myself, looking at Mama in the bath, and worrying that something terrible was wrong with my brother. Naturally, I caused a stir when I grabbed Yousef ’s crotch, unmindful of the neighbors, and my brother hit me hard. Everyone who witnessed the cause of my hysterical screaming agreed that Yousef had done the right thing. Except Mama.

A neighbor woman said to her, “Dalia, a girl just can’t do that, even if she is four. Best break her of the devil’s habits early.”
Break her. Beat her. Teach her a lesson
. Another said, “You can bet she won’t do that again.” Still another: “He’s her older brother and he has every right to hit his sister if she misbehaves.”

But Mama took my side, reprimanding Yousef. “Don’t ever hit your sister. Ever,” Mama said, and I waxed triumphant, ready to be received into my mother’s arms. But she would have none of that either.

“Stop crying, Amal,” she ordered, not angry, mean, or even firm. Matter-of-fact, efficient, tough.

On a morning in April, the month of flowers, I discovered a side of my father I had never seen before. So ceaselessly did he work and so infrequently did I see him that I had only adored him from afar until that day. I was five years old. I awoke before dawn in a panic to wet clothes, and I rushed to sort out my predicament in the only room that offered privacy. To my horror and shame, Baba was waiting for me as I emerged from the toilet. More than punishment, I feared his disappointment.

That day is one of my clearest childhood memories. Without words, Baba helped me into clean pajamas and I levitated off the ground in his enormous arms. He carried me a few steps, my small head buried in his neck, and sat me in his lap on the terrace, a four-by-three-meter patch of stone and tile covered with a canopy of grape vines—Mama’s stubborn attempt to duplicate the glory of her gardens in Ein Hod. It was still dark, but I recall the shadowy landscape of the countryside’s blossoming fruit trees. Peach, pomegranate, and olive were in bloom when, by the light of a wax candle, my father read to me for the first time.

For a long time after, my senses could conjure from memory the sweet scents of spring that had bewitched the air. My father’s olive-wood pipe had protruded from the side of his mouth and the smoke of honey apple tobacco also had marked that special morning.

“Listen to the words I read. They’re magical,” he said. And I tried very hard to understand the classical Arabic prose, but to my young mind it seemed another language. Still, the cadence was mesmerizing, and Baba’s voice was a lullaby. I dozed in his arms.

I told no one of the incident and I lived through the day in anticipation of night, the darkness just before dawn, hoping to once again have a special place in Baba’s morning.

I fit perfectly into Baba’s lap. His arms circled and held me there, my head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. He read to me again.

Stop, oh my friends, let us pause to weep

over the remembrance of my beloved.

Here was her abode on the edge of the sandy desert

between Dakhool and Howmal.

The traces of her encampment

are not wholly obliterated even now.

For when the south wind blows the sand over them

the north wind sweeps it away.

The courtyards and enclosures

of the old home have become desolate;

The dung of the wild deer lies there

thick as the seeds of pepper.

On the morning of our separation

it was as if I stood in the gardens of our tribe,

Amid the acacia-shrubs where my eyes

were blinded with tears by the smart

from the bursting pods of colocynth.

I could hear the turbulence inside Baba’s chest, the protests of his lungs against each inhalation of honey apple tobacco.

“Baba, who do you love more, me or Yousef?”

“Habibti,” he began. I couldn’t help but smile when he called me that. “I love you both the same,” he said.

“How big do you love me?”

“I love you as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and all its birds. As big as the earth and all her trees.”

“What about the universe and all its planets? You forgot that part.”

“I was getting to it. Be patient,” he said, puffing on his pipe. He exhaled, “And I love you
bigger
than the universe and all its planets.”

“Do you love Yousef that much?”

“Yes. As big as the ocean . . . but without all the fishes.”

My heart grew with all the fishes, the idea that Baba loved me just a little more. “What about the sky and earth? Do you love him that big but without all the birds and trees?”

“Yes. But don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t, Baba, I swear.” My heart swelled with birds now. “What about the universe part?”

“Don’t be greedy.” He winked at me. “I have to get to work, habibti. Tomorrow.”

Habibti. Tomorrow
.

It was difficult to wake up so early and I would nod back to sleep in Baba’s arms. Eventually I became accustomed to rising before the sun, a habit that has long endured. Every dawn, while Baba read on the terrace of our small adobe home, he and I witnessed the sun pour itself over the land, drenching everything it touched with life.

Many a night has let down its curtains

around me amid deep grief,

It has whelmed me as a wave

of the sea to try me with sorrow.

Then I said to the night,

as slowly his huge bulk passed over me,

As his breast, his loins, his buttocks weighed on me

and then passed afar,

“Oh long night, dawn will come,

but will be no brighter without my love.

You are a wonder, with stars held up

as by ropes of hemp to a solid rock.”

At other times, I have filled a leather water-bag

of my people and entered the desert,

And trod its empty wastes while the wolf howled

like a gambler whose family starves.

Baba said, “The land and everything on it can be taken away, but no one can take away your knowledge or the degrees you earn.” I was six then and high marks in school became the currency I gave for Baba’s approval, which I craved now more than ever. I became the best student in all of Jenin and memorized the poems my father so loved. Even when my body grew too big for his lap, the sun always found us cuddled together with a book.

My life before the war returns to me now in memories bracketed by Baba’s arms and scented with the tobacco of his olive-wood pipe. We had meager possessions and scarce necessities. I never knew a playground nor swam in the ocean, but my childhood was magical, enchanted by poetry and the dawn. I have never known a place as safe as his embrace, my head nestled in the arch of his neck and stalwart shoulders. I have never known a more tender time than the dawn, coming with the smell of honey apple tobacco and the dazzling words of Abu-Hayyan, Khalil Gibran, al-Maarri, Rumi. I did not always understand what they wrote, but their verses were hypnotic and lyrical. Through them, I felt my father’s passions, his losses, his heartaches, and his loves. He passed all of that to me. This great gift from Baba was something no one could take away. And decades later, in the bleak early hours of a Pennsylvania February, the words of Gibran’s haunting rhythms and the memory of Baba’s soft baritone would be my only thread of solace.