Mornings in Jenin (7 page)

NINE

June in the Kitchen Hole

1967

THEN CAME JUNE OF 1967. The hot month of pretty things and no school. I was meandering in the abandon of childhood, one month before my twelfth birthday.

Not to be outdone by Lamya, our friend with a monkey’s capacity for cartwheels and flips, Huda and I had resolved to execute the perfect somersault. We were practicing in the soft clearing near the peach orchard, west of Jenin.

“You call that a cartwheel?”

“Let’s see you try, Amal!”

I did and landed flat on my back.

“Pathetic,” Huda snickered.

“Oh God!” I moaned. “My leg! I’m really hurt.”

“Get up . . . come on. I know you’re pretending.” Huda’s voice spiked with concern. “Amal. Amal. Oh, my God!”

I erupted with laughter and Huda’s alarm turned to irritation.

“That’s not funny, Amal!” she yelled. “Anyway, you still can’t even do a cartwheel, much less a somersault.” She knew how to make me stop laughing.

“Neither can you!”

“I’m not the one trying to outdo Lamya.”

It was true. Huda just liked to play, but with me, everything was a competition.

“Want to practice again later?” I asked.

“Yeah. Let’s go climb Old Lady.”

Old Lady was a fifteen-hundred-year-old olive tree with serpentine arms that twisted into the air like Samson’s locks bursting from the center of a grazing pasture. Fruit dangled from hundreds of knobby little twigs on an enormous misshapen trunk, which was also a resting spot for local shepherds.

Baba once told me that no one owned Old Lady. “This old girl was here long before any of us, and she’ll be here long after we’re gone. How can you own that, habibti?”

I loved it when my father called me habibti, my beloved.

“No one can own a tree,” he continued. “It can belong to you, as you can belong to it. We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.”

I asked Huda what she thought Baba meant.

“Your baba always says strange stuff. Haj Salem says he reads too much. Yesterday I heard Haj Salem tell your brother to go pull your father’s nose out of his books and drag him to the Beit Jawad coffeehouse to smoke a hooka with him and Ammo Jack O’Malley.”

Ammo Jack was a heavyset man with a cluttered laugh that seemed to rumble from untuned bass chords in his big heart. He had a full head of white hair, usually rumpled and unbarbered. His equally thick facial hair was yellow-stained by a long liaison with Lucky Strikes and occasional hooka pipes. His UN job was to administer the schools and clinics and he rarely visited his office, choosing instead the hooka-puffing company of Haj Salem at Beit Jawad’s.

We climbed Old Lady’s back, swung and dangled from her limbs, balanced on her neck, and finally rested on her belly, where her trunk split into three main branches.

“Is there anything left of the nail polish?” Huda asked, inspecting the chipped red paint on her nails.

Someone had given the polish to Mama as a gift a week earlier, but she was beyond such indulgences and had given it to me. At least ten of us girls had gathered to share it, painting one another’s nails, imagining that we looked like the Egyptian actresses in magazines.

“There’s a little left,” I said.

She perked up. “Let’s paint our fingers and toes again, but without all the other girls.”

“Okay. But first let’s have a spit contest.”

“Haven’t we had enough contests today?” Huda complained, but quickly relented.

A spit-dangle contest. That’s what we were doing when we were summoned
.

“Your spit will go farther if you suck snot from your head.” I demonstrated, making hacking sounds. “Just regular spit breaks off. That’s how come you always lose this game.”

“That’s gross,” Huda complained.

“Amaaaal! . . . Huuuuuudaaaaaaa!”

Baba was calling us home to the camp, where we all lived in the shade of international charity.

“Your father’s calling.” Huda stated the obvious, as was her annoying habit. “Why isn’t he at work today?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go.”

We ran. I turned it into a race, but I stopped before we reached the camp’s first row of concrete shacks.

Something was happening. Too many people were on the streets.

Instinctively, Huda and I reached for each other’s hand and we walked slowly toward the commotion. Anxious throngs were chanting in the streets and alleyways. In their embroidered Palestinian thobes, women hurried about, balancing baskets of provisions on their heads. Uncertainty shivered in the air. Some people were crying. Some displayed their joy with the trilling of zaghareet. Israel had just attacked Egypt. A loud radio announced, “The Arab armies are mobilizing to defend against Zionist aggression.”

Baba came toward us and gathered Huda and me in his outstretched arms. “Habibti, something has happened. The two of you must go directly to the house.” He was calm and serious. “Now go, girls,” and we went.

At our house, men were waiting for my father, who had gone off to telephone my brother in Bethlehem, where Yousef worked.

Mama hurried toward us when she saw Huda and me approaching. She surprised me with a tight embrace and mumbled into the air, “Praise and thanks to You, Allah, for my child.” Mama kissed me as she rarely did. If I could, I’d not have let her go. Her sudden display of affection made me grateful for Israel’s attack.

“Allaho akbar!” someone shouted. “Soon we’re going home to Palestine!”

With Mama’s new warmth lingering, I was hopeful. I conjured all the places of the home that had been built up in my young mind, one tree, one rosebush, one story at a time. I thought of the water and sandy beaches of the Mediterranean—“The Bride of Palestine,” Baba called it—which I had visited only in my dreams. A delicious anticipation bore visions of the old life, the one I had never known. My rightful life, disinherited but finally to be regained, in the back terrace of Jiddo Yehya’s and Teta Basima’s mansion, with its succulent grapes dangling from their vines, Mama’s rose garden, the Arabian horses Ammo Darweesh raised, Baba’s library, and our family’s farm, which had sustained half the village.

I comforted Huda, who seemed frightened, with a reminder that we would have our own room once we returned, and money enough for dolls. In my naïve confidence, I pointed to the disorganized and untrained men. “Just look at them,” I told her, impressed with the would-be fighters who walked among us. “Just look . . .”

Baba had long been hiding rifles in a hole dug in the kitchen floor, under the sink. He was back now, talking to the men. I knew the time had come to use those weapons.

For years, I had heard Baba complain that King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan was disarming the Palestinians, leaving us defenseless against Zionists who were amassing more and more weapons with the help of the West. So whenever he could get his hands on a weapon, Baba hid it in the hole in the kitchen floor. He had covered the hole with a sheet of tile and declared it off-limits to children. I dared not disobey.

That day I watched Baba open the secret hiding place and empty it of more than twenty rifles. He distributed the weapons to the fighters, whom I had until then only known as fathers, brothers, uncles, and husbands.

I stepped away. From afar, I fixed my eyes on the gentle soul who was my father as something fierce inside him forced its way to the surface. His face became hard and the smile that lived in Baba’s eyes disappeared. He spoke to the men with an unfamiliar voice that bore no hint of the intellectual, solitary man who spent his time with books or in communion with the land. I had not the fortitude then, nor the capacity, to comprehend the urgent change in my father, or indeed that in the other adults— all of whom had already lived through one dreadful war and heartbreaking eviction.

“Amal.” Mama grabbed my arm. “Don’t wander off. You and Huda stay where I can find you.”

A clap like thunder boomed in the distance. It made me jump and put greater urgency in Mama’s voice. She looked at me with her bottomless black eyes, the ones I had inherited, and repeated the lesson she wanted me to learn most of all: “Be strong like I’ve taught you to be, no matter what happens.”

My momentary conviction that better times were at hand sank into fear as Mama moved Huda and me, like game pieces, into a corner.

“Stay here and don’t leave my sight,” she ordered us.

None of the adults would tell us what was going on, so we pieced together snatches of their conversations as best we could.

The hurried tempo, long sighs, intense looks, and solidifying wills pushed Huda and me closer together, the two of us clinging to the wall, wide-eyed and confused. An announcement came that the women and children should stay put while the men were to hunker into defensive positions—“Until the Arab armies come,” someone said. Huda and I locked arms. Fear crawled through our bodies and made our muscles twitch and contract involuntarily.

“I love you, Amal,” Huda cried.

“Me too. You’re my best friend, Huda.”

“You’re my best friend, too.”

“We’ll be safe. My baba has weapons and he’ll protect us.”

“Let’s stay together.”

“No matter what.”

“Swear?”

“I swear by Allah.”

We hugged to seal our promise.

The men waited for the enemy, but no enemy soldiers appeared.

Time after that ran as a continuous stream, unmarked by day or night. We could not see the enemy’s face, but we heard them: airplanes, so many, flew close to the earth and dropped bombs. Mama hurried Huda and me into the hole in the kitchen, now devoid of firearms.

The hole was as deep as I was tall, and wide enough that Huda and I could crouch at its bottom. I looked up from that position and saw Mama’s face, bottom-up. How strong her jaws looked that way. As she was closing us in, I caught sight of a brightly painted bowl on the kitchen counter, a Mother’s Day craft I had made in kindergarten. I recalled how Mama’s face had opened when I gave it to her, and how it had closed when I told her I wished I had a better mother to give it to; I was five then and I had just wanted to see if I could make her clench her teeth and bulge her jaw muscles.

The lid covered us in and the Mother’s Day bowl disappeared on the other side. It was dark in that kitchen hole.

“Huda,” I whispered, still holding on to her as tightly as she held on to me.

“Yes.” She was trembling.

“I’m sorry I always yell at you.” Huda had been my only true friend. Other girls had no tolerance for my endless competitions, which I had to win. I was bossy and rude. Now I thought I was going to die.

A long time passed before Mama suddenly pulled off the tile cover and handed us a baby. It was Khalto Sameeha’s little girl, my three-month-old cousin, Aisha.

“Take Aisha. I’ll be back soon,” Mama said, her voice hoarse.

A month earlier, Khalto Sameeha had pierced the baby’s ears, and Aisha was still wearing the darling little studs with blue stones that her father had chosen to repel the evil eye. We didn’t know it yet, but Khalto Sameeha, her husband, and my six-year-old cousin Musa had not survived the attack. Only Aisha had. Wrapped in a blanket that Mama had knitted for her when she was born, Aisha lay alongside the road to the East Bank, not far from where her family lay dead on the ground. A woman hurrying from Jenin recognized the blanket and knew that Mama was still at the camp, having refused to flee with the others. She sent Aisha back to Mama with a young Jordanian soldier who was separated from his retreating battalion, which had been sent by the Hashemite Kingdom to defend against Israel’s invasion.

Huda, Aisha, and I remained in the hole for what seemed like an eternity of ghostly quiet. Then Mama returned with a loaf of bread and milk for the baby. She was disheveled and dirty, her eyes darting side to side.

“Amal, Huda, are you okay?” Mama asked, reaching her arm inside to feel for us.

“Yes, Mama, but—”

“Stay put, girls. Jordan, Syria, and Iraq are fighting alongside Egypt. This will all be over soon. Everything will be all right.”

“Mama, we have to poop and the baby has messed her diaper,” I pleaded, but she was already gone.

Without words, Huda and I removed the diaper and buried it beneath our feet. We took turns relieving ourselves and covered the mess with dirt we scraped off the sides of the hole. Mama had left the tile cover slightly off for air and light to seep in, but the only air was a cloud of dust and no light came. We heard explosions and panic above, but we dared not remove the tiled cover or move at all.

Days passed, I think. The baby was inconsolable at times. Huda and I joined her, the two of us sobbing in terror with the child. The baby screamed until she could cry no more. We heard other screams. Beyond the tiled cover, children wailed uncomprehendingly. Women, as helpless as their children, cried and prayed loudly, as if trying to catch God’s attention through the chaos. We heard destruction and blasts of fire. We heard chants. The odor of burning flesh, fermenting garbage, and scorched foliage mixed with the smell of our own excrement in the dust.