Mornings in Jenin (8 page)
“Huda, I think this is Judgment Day. It’s just like it says in the Quran.”
“Oh God. Let’s say the Shehadeh and pray for forgiveness.”
“Ashhado an la ellaha ella Allah.” We recited the words that would get us into heaven.
We cried. Our faces blackened and our bellies empty, we begged for God’s mercy.
“Please forgive me, Lord, for splashing mud on Lamya’s new dress. Forgive me for . . .” My prayers went on and mixed with Huda’s.
“Please, Lord,” Huda prayed, “forgive my father.”
A loud explosion blew off the tile cover. Suddenly there was light and we were covered with dust and debris. My ears rang with the blast. I was screaming and crying, but I could not hear myself. The two of us were crouched over the baby, our arms covering our heads. I peeked at Huda and saw her suspended in mid-scream, a mute screech of absolute terror. Her hair was matted, white with dust and wet with blood, and her face was covered with filth. Blood dripped down her temple. My heart thrashed with such potency that I could hear it.
Ba-boom, ba-boom
. The blast closed my ears to all sounds except the rhythm of my heart’s vigor and the gurgle of terror. It was a dense consuming silence, like the calm at the center of a hurricane or the hush of sound underwater.
I looked down at Aisha. She was sleeping. Her face was calm. Seraphic. Her sweet little rosy lips were slightly parted, almost in a smile. I did not understand. My tears landed on her face, streaking the filth on her cheek. Her abdomen was a gaping hole cradling a small piece of shrapnel. The whole world squeezed itself into my heartbeat as I took the bloodied metal in my hand. So small and light, how could it have cut her open like that? How could it have taken a life with such ease?
I rose to my feet still holding my dead baby cousin and the scrap of metal. The kitchen floor had been at the level of my eyes, but the kitchen was gone and I could see sky where the roof had been. Before me were heaps of rubble, some of it smoldering still. A man I recognized as our neighbor, Abu Sameeh, was digging frantically through a heap of rubble with his bloodied hands. He disappeared in a plume of smoke, then emerged with a small child in his arms and pierced my trance with a frightful howl of condensed irrevocability.
There, on the rubble where his refugee’s shack had stood and where his family was buried alive, he stood on the threshold of an abyss and cried, his face deformed with agony and his voice charged with despair. Clutching his limp child in his arms, he arched his neck toward the heavens and released a hair-raising wail, a guttural surrender to his fate.
Abu Sameeh was a refugee who had started life over after 1948. That Israeli campaign had taken the lives of his father and four brothers. He had married in the refugee camp, raised children, and supported his two widowed sisters. Like the rest of us, he looked forward to the return, when we would all go home. But in the end, the original injustice came to him again and took his entire family once more. There could be no starting over a third time. Nothing more of life was left to live.
Children, some of whom I recognized, wandered aimlessly. Some were crying, some stared vacantly. I looked down and saw Huda still in the hole, stooped in a fetal position, rocking back and forth. She had stopped screaming, but I could hear her reciting the Fatiha, the first verse of the Holy Quran.
In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Praise be to the God of the worlds, the Merciful, the Compassionate, Lord of the Day of Judgment. You do we worship and to You do we turn for help. Guide us to the true path, the path of those whom You have favored. Not those who have incurred Your wrath. Nor those who have strayed. Amen.
Then she’d start over.
In the name of Allah, the Merciful
. . .
I felt frozen, unable to lift my feet, as if they had been cemented. I turned my eyes, absorbing it all, and I saw Mama. She was sitting on the ground, her eyes distant and uninhabited. She seemed not to notice when soldiers pulled up in their trucks.
I ducked back into our hole, cowering under whatever I could pull over us for cover, shreds of corrugated metal and a mangled bicycle. I motioned to Huda with the “shhh” sign as our eyes bulged through a new fear.
I stood again, careful to peek without being seen. All I could see of the soldiers were their legs. They wore big boots that seemed to stomp my body as they walked about. They had bombed and burned, killed and maimed, plundered and looted. Now they had come to claim the land.
We ducked low in the hole when we heard shouts and conversations in a language we did not understand. Then, a single gunshot. When I dared to peek out again, I saw Abu Sameeh lying on the ground, a gun in his hand and his dead son in the other arm. The soldiers had shot him. He lay there, eyes wide, forever gazing, disbelieving. His life drained from his body onto the earth, and I watched from the kitchen hole as the pool of blood widened beneath him like a whisper of unsung endings.
Abu Sameeh had mustered what strength remained in him and tried to fire on the enemy he had been searching for but could not find. His gun failed, and the soldiers executed him. It was a merciful thing.
Huda and I remained where we were, too frightened to move. After the soldiers left, we dug a small shelf in the earth with our fingers and laid the baby there, in the wall of the hole in what had been our kitchen.
We fell asleep, wrapped around each other like twins in a womb, until a hand reached into the hole and woke us. Startled but weak, we looked up and saw a nun. She was yelling in broken Arabic: “Stretchers, quick! Two little girls! They’re breathing. Over here!”
Dumb with fear and hunger, Huda and I tightened our bodies around each other in an unspoken demand, which the nun understood. We would not be separated!
Huda remained curled like a fetus as we were carried to a makeshift hospital set up by international relief agencies. I was prostrate, taking it all in, my teeth grinding the dirt that coated my mouth no matter how hard I labored to spit it out. That was when I saw the torn corpse of Huda’s father pass in a wheelbarrow. She did not see him, as her eyes were shut.
Where is Baba?
Please God please
, I repeated endlessly,
bring him to me now
.
“We named you Amal with a long vowel because the short vowel means just one hope, one wish,” my father had once said. “You’re so much more than that. We put all of our hopes into you. Amal, with the long vowel, means hopes, dreams, lots of them.” Only six years old then, I grew with the belief that I alone held my father’s dreams, all of them.
I had just one wish now: to see Baba again.
The good nun—Sister Marianne, she called herself—walked next to us with Aisha covered in her arms. Before we got to the hospital tent we were by stopped a soldier—the first Israeli soldier I had ever seen up close. He was very tall. The sun screwed my eyes shut when I tried to see him all the way to the top of his helmet.
“You cannot take the child there,” the soldier said in thick, broken Arabic.
“Why not?”
“Reporters.”
“You’re afraid the world might see what you do to children?”
“Shut up. I will shoot you here, if you like,” he warned, raising his rifle, but also, strangely, smiling.
Unperturbed, she replied, “Do it. You are no different from Nazis who stood in my way when I cared for Jews in the Second World War.” She narrowed her eyes around her recognition of his accent and spoke to him in a language they both knew. His eyes expanded with surprise, then he responded in the same language and finally nodded his head with permission for us to proceed.
“Take the girls to Station Three,” Sister Marianne ordered the volunteer workers. As we passed the soldier, I looked up from the stretcher and glimpsed his eyes. Blue like the sky.
Huda and I were treated for minor cuts. She received a few stitches in her head. Probably the cut was from falling debris. I saw Mama in the treatment tent and rushed toward her, aching for another embrace. She sat motionless in a corner, just as I had seen her sitting on the ground when I had stood up in the kitchen hole. I stopped. Her spacious empty eyes did not see me standing before her. She seemed to see nothing.
“Mama.” I touched her lightly, but she did not respond. I put my face in front of hers, but her eyes looked through me.
Sister Marianne approached me, putting her arms around me—how good that felt.
“Do you know this woman?”
“Is she dead?”
“No, dear. She’s in shock. Do you know her?” Sister Marianne asked again.
Just then, a beseeching resentment filled me. I hated Mama for being in shock, whatever that was, for not being the one to put her arms around me, for always having been different from the other mothers.
“No,” I lied. “I don’t know her.”
I shrank behind my disgraceful lie to remain in the protection of Sister Marianne, and Huda followed my lead. She was confused and frightened, wanting only to stay with me.
I recognized many other faces in the makeshift hospital and tried to recall the last time I had seen them before all this. Basima lay sleeping on a cot with a bloody bandage around her head and a splint on her leg. I had last seen her breastfeeding her baby at Khalto Sameeha’s house, the day baby Aisha had had her ears pierced. Ammo Muneer was awake and bloody in a chair. My last image of him had been at Beit Jawad’s coffeehouse, where he had sat reading and cursing Arab leaders who were quoted in the newspaper.
But still no Baba.
I closed my eyes and kept them that way as long as I could, opening them just enough to dispel the images from my own head.
Later that day, Sister Marianne took Huda and me with her in a Red Crescent truck on a long ride to Bethlehem. She made us hide inside food crates when we arrived at a checkpoint. Luckily, the soldiers just opened the door, took a quick look, and closed it back. When the truck stopped again, we were at a familiar church. Baba had once pointed it out to me as the Church of the Nativity, during one of the Christian celebrations we had often traveled to watch. “They say that’s where Master Esa was born,” he had said to me, patiently answering my endless questions.
Bethlehem looked just like Jenin, crumbled, torched, and strewn with death. The church where Master Esa was born had been shelled and still smelled of fire. Inside, hundreds of children, most of them orphaned by the war, sat on the floor. No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was merely a nightmare. The silence reached up to the cathedral ceiling and cluttered there, echoing sadness and unseen mayhem, as if too many souls were rising at once. We were existing somewhere between life and death, with neither accepting us fully.
Sister Marianne arrived, carrying an urn of water.
“Follow me, dears. You’ll need to bathe together to save water,” she instructed us as Huda and I walked behind her to the washroom. The good nun poured the water and left us. We were so bewildered that we got into the metal tub with our filthy garments. The warm water traveled over my body like a loving embrace, whispering a promise of safety.
Huda and I disrobed in the tub and sat across from one another. Browned water separated us, but our legs rested together. Face to face, we stared at one another’s thoughts, seeing each other’s terror and knowing that we had crossed some unmarked boundary beyond which there could be no return. The world we knew was gone. Somehow we knew that. We cried silently and moved into each other’s small arms.
We lay that way, in the quiet of a foreboding for which we knew no words. I looked at my toes protruding from the water. Chipped red polish. It had been only one week since we had passed around the nail polish, giddy over something that had made us feel older. Now, in that bathtub inside the church where Master Esa was born, Huda’s nails and mine still bore the chipped red remnants of that day. I calculated one week as the distance between girlish vanity and hell.
Slowly, I let my body slide, pulling my head beneath the water. There, in that silent world, like the stillness I had heard after the blast that had torn the kitchen and killed Aisha, I had an odd desire to be a fish.
I could live inside water’s soothing world, where screams and gunfire were not heard and death was not smelled.
1967
LOOKING OUT THE BROKEN window in our devastated camp, the sun was still hidden from view, but the sky was already ablaze with the purples and oranges that announce its coming. Amazingly, the cocks had survived, keeping to their regimen of crowing, unaware of the portentous shadow that hung over us. As always, I was up before dawn. Sunrise belonged to Baba and me, when he would read to me as the world around us slept. It had been forty days since the war had ended and Sister Marianne had returned us to Jenin and I had found Mama with a broken mind. Baba and my brother Yousef were still missing.
Soon, the melody of the adan came through the air, into our makeshift homes, to call the faithful to prayer. Decades later, after a life in exile, that unmistakable cadence of the Arab soul would summon a calm certainty in my heart that I had made the right decision to return to Jenin.
Although it was still dangerous to venture outside, little Samer, our five-year-old neighbor, was running through the refugee camp yelling incoherently, his high-pitched voice slashing the stillness of “curfew,” which was now a fact of our lives.
I guessed that the poor child was reliving the terror of recent events. It would not have been surprising, for lately most of the young ones wailed in their sleep.
“They’re naked,” Samer panted, struggling to order his thoughts. “They need clothes. They told me.”
Little Samer sounded hysterical and people began to stir. Exhausted and bewildered eyes peered from windows. Old women cracked their improvised doors for a look.
“What’s going on?” called a voice down the alleyway.
“Are we at war again?” asked another. In these moments of confusion, despair, and anticipation, the rumor pulsed like a wave of hope through the living dead.
People began to shout, “Allaho akbar!”
Faces appeared at the windows of every shack and more cries were heard as excitement surged through the camp. From a window opening blackened by fire came a euphoric note: “The Arab armies are coming to liberate us!” But the people remained hesitant, for we could see Israeli soldiers perched on their lookout posts. Arrogant conquerors, they. Murderers and thieves. I hated them as much as I hated the sea of white cloth fluttering over our homes—signs of our humiliating surrender.
But as quickly as the euphoria rose, so it fell when Samer began to make sense.
“Enough! There is no more war. The boy says our sons are alive,” came a man’s voice, quieting the war songs. It was Haj Salem.
He survived!
I wondered where he had taken refuge.
Haj Salem had seen it all. That’s what he used to tell us youngsters. It took many seasons to learn his story because he gave it in pieces. “I’ve seen it all,” he would say. “I worked faithfully for those yellow-haired, colored-eyed men, and in return they brought us foreign Jews who stole my furniture.” Always just pieces to the puzzle of his existence, offered up one at a time. “I’ve seen it all. All the wars. They kicked us off the land and they took all the furniture I had made.” Then he would walk away, leaving us to the naggings of curiosity. But in our camp, his story was everyone’s story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel. Haj Salem was a sagacious man with light-hearted humor who morphed wood into ornate furniture and delicate trinkets. Once, he claimed, a high-ranking British officer had bought one of his olive-wood carvings of the Virgin Mary to give to the queen of the yellow-haired, colored-eyed men, provoking in me a fantastical notion that Haj Salem knew a queen.
He was the most animated and lively character of my youth, and it was he who passed history on to the camp’s children. My treasure of Palestinian folklore and proverbs came from him. It was he who gave me the names and stories of people I would encounter as miscellaneous victims of war in the history texts that I would read decades later.
We loved to trap him, tugging at him with pleas for a story about the old days. We would beg, ten or twenty snot-nosed, barefoot urchins promising not to bother him again, until he would relent, knowing well that we would return the next day, or the next hour.
We would gather around him on the ground and position our attention to absorb the great gifts he told. Then, he would weave dynamic accounts of life and past events with such intricate clarity that Palestine and all her villages, many long since razed by Israel, would come alive in my mind as if I had lived there myself. His raspy voice, scratched by years of smoking muaasal on the hooka, would spiritedly rise and fall, prodding our imaginations to live among our forefathers, watching past events unfold as if that very moment.
To our young eyes, Haj Salem seemed inconceivably old. “At least ninety,” Lamya ventured to guess on one occasion. Only as an adult would I realize that he was merely in his early sixties during those times before the 1967 war. He was nearly bald, with thinning white hair patched over enormous ears. His brown skin bore a great deal of hair, covering a tall frame of bones that protruded at his shoulders like a clothes hanger under the traditional dishdashe. Like most Palestinian men, he wore the checkered black and white kaffiyeh, loosely swathed around his head. He had an unkempt mustache that often betrayed the foods he ate. It was a massive, jet-black thing that never aged—even when he was well into his nineties—an odd relic of youth on a withered old face. Best of all, he had no teeth. He had lost them, he said, “in a battle with scurvy.” Naturally, all of us children hated “scurvy,” which we assumed to be an Israeli monster. When we indulged in juvenile name-calling, invariably “scurvy” was invoked as an insult. “You’re wicked like scurvy” was part of my own arsenal of vulgarity. By the time I was nine, someone had set me straight and I never used it again.
I remember well that toothless grin. As children, my cousins, friends, and I had often tried to make him laugh. We would lampoon Israeli leaders, ridiculing the self-important character of Menachem Begin, whose features we imitated by squishing our faces, or mocking the gnarly disorder of Golda Meir, the “Old Hag,” as the Egyptians called her. Finally, when he could take no more, his pink gums would split his brown head in hearty laughter, squeezing his eyes shut into two long wrinkles that were indistinguishable from the other lines that took their place in that wonderful laugh. Having provoked what we thought was a hilarious sight, we would join him with our giggles.
I never knew from where he came, which town or village, because he knew so much about nearly every part of Palestine. Mama never told me and Yousef wasn’t sure. It was said that his family was killed in the Nakbe of 1948—although he never told us that story. He lived alone, no wife, no children, no brothers or sisters. This was quite remarkable since Arab society revolves around the extended family. No one had “no family.” But Palestinians, who became scattered and dispossessed following the Nakbe, proved so many exceptions to Arab society. He had been friends with Jiddo Yehya. That much I knew from Baba.
Haj Salem was also the first person to tell me about my brother Ismael, who had disappeared as an infant in the fateful mayhem of 1948. “The baby just vanished,” he said in one of his narrated exhumations of history. “Your mother was never the same after that.”
The day when little Samer ran yelling through the camp and I learned that Haj Salem had survived the war of June 1967 would mark the end of life as I had known it and the beginning of a military occupation that would rule our lives. It had been forty days since Israeli soldiers had gone from shelter to shelter, rounding up all the men who remained in the camp. For forty days, we were under curfew, and during those long hours Huda and I remained inseparable, even going to the bathroom together. Our house had been destroyed, so we took refuge in Khalto Sameeha’s house, where we tried not to look at Aisha’s crib. Mama was already there when we arrived, praying. She didn’t say anything to me, just produced an old loaf of bread and cheese for us and went back to her prayer mat. I had followed her, and standing behind her, I wrapped my arms around her. I felt ashamed, wondering if she had been aware when I left her. Mama didn’t say anything and neither did I. She just patted my hand softly, maybe lovingly. Then I left her, again. Huda and I found a deck of cards in the pantry and invented games with improvised rules. Sometimes we sat silently in a corner, hypnotized by the rhythm of Mama’s murmur and the slow swaying of her body as she prayed on the floor for hours on end. We combed and braided one another’s hair and started to talk about what we had lived through. Eventually, we cried.
Little Samer banged on the metal door. My head was already hanging out the window, and our neighbor, Samirah, hung her head from the window next to mine.
“Amal,” Samer called to me, “Yousef is alive!”
Samirah, her hair wild and eyes still full of sleep, asked about her brother. “What about Farook?”
But Samer had already moved on, his little legs sprinting. By then other children from the camp had joined him, and they ran in a growing pack, like stampeding little banshees. I pulled my head inside to wake Mama, but she was already coming toward me.
“What’s happening?”
“Samer Haitham says Yousef is naked.”
“What?”
“Yousef is alive.”
“Allaho akbar! Where is my son?”
“I think the peach orchard.”
“Is he with your father?” She asked the question foremost in my mind.
Mama and I were outside in no time. Her favorite scarf was tightly wrapped on her head, its hems pouring down her shoulders. That scarf had been a present from Baba years ago when he got his first pay as a janitor at the UNRWA school for refugee boys in our camp. Now yellowed by time, it had been white with ornate stitching along its border. When Mama’s body finally caught up to her mind, which had departed the world soon after the 1967 war, I kept that scarf, and I still have it, tucked safely in a small box that holds what remains to me from my family.
But on that fortieth day, all I wanted was to see Baba. Nothing else mattered. Nothing less would heal my wound but to lie in the safety of his embrace and hear him whisper that everything was going to be fine.
By the time a small crowd of people started to form, it was clear that, indeed, some of the men were returning to the camp. Women started their ululating zaghareet and chanted, “Allaho akbar.” I knew Yousef was among them, but there was no mention of Baba.
I waited in the chaotic anxiety of those endless moments before the men arrived. The longer I could not make out Baba’s figure in the distance, the greater my heart’s fear of the unbearable. With fatiguing will, I held back an urge to cry and climbed onto the flat roof of an intact building for a clear view.
Looking out at the new landscape of hastily built Israeli watchtowers, I felt years crammed into weeks, a terrible dream with no end. The earthen taste of demise pervaded, and those days entrenched themselves in my memory as particles of bloodied dust and the putridly sweet scent of rotting life and scorched soil. We moved but went nowhere. We looked, but reality blurred our vision. We inhaled and exhaled the dust of carnage, but we were not breathing. As the crowd grew larger, I watched from the roof in the silence of my private upheaval. We were refugees, all of us. Those who had fled had become refugees once again, in another human junkyard dotting Israel’s brief history. And those of us who had remained became prisoners in Jenin.
Now our waiting was for freedom. The original hopes to return home became pleas for elemental rights. Before, we had longed to see Haifa, Yaff a, Lydda, Lod. Now it was a mortal risk to step into the fresh air. Gone were the days of family trips to Tulkarem and Ramallah. Jerusalem, too, was gone. “They burned Jerusalem; may God burn them, too,” came a woman’s voice in a context that I no longer recall.
Huda climbed next to me on the roof, where I stood searching the distance for Baba.
Our terror in the kitchen hole had only strengthened the bond between Huda and me. She possessed a tenderness and loyalty that yielded to me in our friendship. Although adversity in the decades ahead would reveal a natural poise and a quiet strength, in our youth her timidity and solitary temperament made many think her odd, especially the adults.
The old women in the camp loved to survey Huda’s eyes. “There’s that strange little girl. Come over here, darling,” they would say. And while she stood obediently without protest against their prodding fingers and stale breath, they would behold what they proclaimed to be the “touch of the divine” in her eyes, which were an unusual mélange of gray and bronze.
Huda had lived with us for three years before the 1967 war. Those were likely the happiest times of my childhood. Each day, fourth through sixth grades, she and I walked hand in hand to and from school. We found trees to climb where no one could see us girls behaving like boys. We collected bugs and played make-believe in a playhouse we constructed. Our friendship was hallowed with “Warda,” a one-armed doll that we rescued from a garbage pile near the village of Taybeh. Our playhouse was a home we built for Warda. It had four walls of piled stone and sat beneath the third olive tree, behind the twin cedars on the footpath to nearby Bartaa. We went there nearly every day to care for Warda, and word got around among other girls in the camp that Huda and I were the proud parents of a handicapped baby whose arm had been shot off by an Israeli and who soiled her diapers and cried real tears. It was not long before bands of curious little girls flocked from Jenin to visit at the “Warda house” near Bartaa. And, to keep with custom, they brought sweets. Sometimes the sky would darken over our tea and pastry parties, where Warda was passed among the cooing of so many mothers.