Mornings in Jenin (9 page)
Huda’s father was the reason she came to live with us. He was a dreadful man who beat her and when she was eight,
It
happened. He did
It
to her. It would be an unforgivable betrayal to utter the word. After
It
happened the first and only time, she confessed to me as if
It
were her disgrace, and she allowed me to tell Baba. Alarm had concentrated in Baba’s eyes when I relayed the heavy secret, which I did not fully understand. With firm caution, Baba ordered me to honor Huda’s confidence with discretion. If people knew, it would have been a fadeeha. Such a scandal involving a girl’s virginity was of serious consequence in our culture. Not wanting to scandalize Huda’s pain, my father convened with Ammo Darweesh and Haj Salem in a sober conspiracy to dislodge Huda’s father. Baba did not disclose his cause to either my uncle or the haj, nor did they demand explanation. For my father had a natural authority that inspired loyalty from those who knew him. The three men went first to Faris, Huda’s older brother. Humiliated, Faris turned his outrage on the weakest target, his sister Huda. But Baba managed to have Huda come live with us. And she and I could not have been happier.
We did not see Huda’s father after that. It was rumored that he was crossing into Israel, supplying information about anyone in Jenin trying to organize opposition to Israel. Perhaps that was true for a time, but not after the war. I would not have recognized him in that wheelbarrow but for his four-fingered hand that dangled over the side. I never divulged that sight to Huda.
“Is your brother one of them?” Huda asked as she searched the crowd below.
“Yes. Is Faris?”
“Yes. He’s naked.”
“Yousef is naked, too.”
“Why are they naked?” The question burned between us.
“I think their clothes were stolen,” I finally said.
In the crowd below, I saw the top of Mama’s head next to Um Abdallah, the woman who lived in the shack above ours. She was Samirah’s, Farook’s, and Abdallah’s mother, a widow who was also Mama’s closest friend. They spent much time together, cooking and knitting. Now they waited together for their sons.
“There’s your mother.” Huda’s annoying habit of accentuating the obvious.
“I know.”
“She’s wearing her silk scarf.”
“I know.”
“She’s with Um Abdallah.”
I wanted to yell at her, but I knew such callousness, after all she had lived through, was too cruel. In the stupidity of my youth, I did not have the bearings to appreciate Huda’s sensitivity and allowed it, instead, to exasperate me. I wish I had been as good a friend to her as she was to me.
Still standing on the roof, Huda asked, “Is Farook coming too?”
I did not answer. I could not find Baba among the approaching men.
“Do you think he’s naked, too?” She looked at her feet, then at the sky, and answered herself: “Probably. They’re all naked.”
Lamya, the girl whose somersaults I envied and a regular guest at the Warda house, climbed up next to us. “Why are they naked?” she asked.
Huda answered, “The Jews stole their clothes . . .”
I felt crowded. The sun was full in the sky now. Another dawn without Baba made the air sink with a dreadful reality, and I found it difficult to breathe. Baba’s absence since the war had grown as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and earth and all their birds and trees. The hurt in my heart was as big as the universe and all its planets.
The war changed us, Mama most of all. It withered Mama. Her essential fiber unraveled, leaving her body a mere shell that often filled with hallucination. Following the occupation and the disappearance of my brother and father, Mama hardly left her prayer mat. She had no desire for food and refused even the paltry rations that arrived on the charity truck. The cotton of her gown grew dark with the stench of her unbathed body, and her breath soured. She smelled of fermented misery. Her lips hardened into a web of cracks and her body shrank, while she prayed. And prayed. And while her body lost mass, I watched her eyes grow more vacant, betraying a mind that would henceforth slowly forfeit its charge of reality.
Mama’s bravery during the war would later be invoked as the essence of a fellaha’s fortitude. She refused to flee. She had been pushed off her land once when Ismael was lost, and she had resolved not to let it happen again. Everyone agreed that when it mattered, she showed herself to be truly courageous. “A lot of us just talked big, but we ran for our lives while Um Yousef was true to her word. She said she would not let the Jews take away the only home her daughter knew,” is what people said about Mama after the war.
Mama had stayed for me. And I had left her alone to go off with Sister Marianne. I have never forgiven myself for that.
The day Yousef came back was a day when I recall having great affection for Mama. She still had moments of lucidity then, though with a softer disposition, her austerity perhaps conquered by delirium. I saw her that day in the fullness of motherhood, with all the wounds of her shattered life and broken mind momentarily healed. I saw her as the woman who had risked her life to protect me from what she had once endured. Her movements were sincere, as were her tears. But it was fleeting, as she had already begun to lose her mind. I’d have grabbed those tender moments with my bare hands if I could and stored them in a safe place.
“Allaho akbar!” she cried when I told her that Yousef was alive. Rare tears streaked her face as she joined Um Abdallah in the crowd pushing at the edges of the camp, needing to get as close to the approaching boys and men as possible. We were still under military rule, forbidden from stepping outside whatever structure we knew as refuge. But people were overcome with the news that the men were returning, and they poured into the alleyways, perhaps finding safety in large numbers, or perhaps forgetting that there were risks. I think the soldiers were just not sure what to do.
“Allaho akbar,” over and over. Tens of them, hundreds. A cacophony of “Allaho akbars” merging into one powerful chant as people converged. There were few males in the crowd. Only the very old or very young had been spared. A sea of scarved heads was visible from where I stood. Mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives crying and chanting together, waiting to see what fate, after forty days, was bringing to them.
By the time Yousef made it to the edge of Jenin, the entire camp, thousands of souls, was jumping and shouting, “Allaho akbar.” He carried with him a bundle, apparently extra clothing delivered to the boys along the way by people who had learned that they had been stripped bare.
Soldiers rode up in their trucks and started shooting into the air. The boys from our neighborhood, five of them, hit the ground and the crowd dispersed, with most tucking themselves in the alleyways around our quarters. Lamya and the other girls had already left by then, and when the shooting started, Huda and I both jumped through the window, over the ledge, and into an empty dwelling that was partly bombed out.
I could see Yousef in the distance. He was wearing brown pants that were too small and a ruffled green shirt, the first thing someone had handed to him to cover his nakedness. Baba was not among the men and I cried despite myself, there in the window of the partly bombed-out house with Huda next to me, both of us in a fetal position as we’d been in the kitchen hole, both of us looking out over hundreds of souls jammed into the alley beneath us, all of them confused.
The initial euphoria chilled beneath the July sun when the boys were close enough for us to see the scars and fresh markings on their bodies, nature’s brazen testimony of regular beatings.
Yousef had only been gone forty days, but he looked ten years older. His body had become slight, and seeing him like that put an awful pain in my heart.
Baba was gone forever. My mother kept waiting for him until the day she died, just as she waited to return home, just as she searched her mind for Ismael.
I needed to believe Baba was dead. I could not bear the thought of him suffering away from us and I chose to know he was in heaven wearing his dishdashe and kaffiyeh proudly, the tip of his pipe at his lips, a cup of coffee at his fingers, and a beloved book in his hands. I struggled all my life to keep that image of him—a strong, proud, and loving father. But inevitably the image of Abu Sameeh dead with his gun in his hand near the rubble of his home overtook me, his face eventually becoming Baba’s face.
As the boys approached, I searched for Ammo Darweesh and my cousins. None were in the crowd and I thought they too had not survived. But I would learn later that they had all found refuge in the mountain caves, returning to Jenin months after the war.
Yousef and the five other boys came inside, and people converged to welcome their safe return and to inquire about their own missing loved ones.
Farook, Ameen, Taha, Omar, Mahmoud, and Yousef sat close together, passing a loaf of bread among themselves. They were overwhelmed, exhausted, beaten, and broken. Some onlookers urged the others to give them space and let them collect their wits. Farook’s mother, Um Abdallah, stood over her son, holding his shoulders and kissing his head with a sad smile. Her eldest son, Abdallah, had been killed, but she refused condolences. “I swear by Allah, I will accept only congratulations for my son’s martyrdom,” she insisted.
With eyes that narrated the debilitation of sleepless and tearful nights, Um Jamal, our neighbor in the camp, kept asking the boys: “Do you know anything about Jamal, Yousef? Tell me, Mahmoud, son? Taha? Please, Omar, do you know anything about my Jamal? Please, son? Have you seen him? Is he okay?” Her head followed Yousef ’s averted eyes from side to side trying to find a hint of her son’s fate in my brother’s expression.
“Jamal and I were separated. That is all I know,” Yousef lied.
I learned later that Jamal’s life had ended as an “example.” Soldiers executed him in front of my brother and fifty others. Jamal was blindfolded, hands bound and kneeling, when an Israeli soldier put one bullet into the head of the boy who frequented our house daily, who played soccer in the dirt fields, and who used to call me ammoora—adorable—and ride with us on trips to Jerusalem, the Jordan River, Bethlehem, or Jericho. He was sixteen years old when he became an example.
Yousef was impassive and wanted little to do with food or talk. His eyes, nearly all pupil, seemed to see something eerie.
The crowd thinned. Ameen, Farook, and Mahmoud remained with us. Mama and Um Abdallah sat on the kitchen floor holding hands, praising God and marveling at their boys, half-dead but still among the living, as if they were seeing them for the first time. I prepared kahwe and Huda served it dutifully on a tray to each person. Yousef stood up when he noticed me watching and pulled me into his arms, the lacy ruffle on his green shirt scratching my face. His embrace almost made me believe that it had all been just a bad dream.
But Baba still hadn’t returned.
Later, while Mahmoud and Farook slept, I overheard my brother talking to Ameen. By then, Yousef had acquired a deliberate manner of speech and the war had consolidated an intensity to his character, which would one day take him deep into love and into history.
“It was him!” Yousef said. “I saw the scar! He’s alive and he’s a Yahoodi they call David!”
My brother had seen a Jewish soldier with a scar identical to the one that had marked the face of our brother Ismael, who had vanished seven years before I was born.
1967
WATCHING DAVID, HIS BROAD shoulders bent over the dinner table, Jolanta could scarcely comprehend how much time had passed since the first day Moshe had brought him to her, a frightened, wounded little bundle.
She thought of that beautiful creature, now a man kissing her cheek and saying, “I love you, too, Ma!” He was so small in her arms then; she would hold him to suckle at her dry breasts when no one was around.
She had doted and fussed over him. Made him dress in too many clothes in the winter, something he had tolerated until the age of seven, when he had realized he could refuse to wear what she picked for him. She had adored even his defiance and could barely conceal a smile when he would assert his independence.
She always worried and he always said, “Don’t worry, Ma, I’ll be fine.” When he had his first sleepover at the age of eight, she worried that he would feel homesick and she made him promise to call no matter what time of night. During his first weekend camping trip when he was ten, the list of her worries had been so long that even she couldn’t remember it now. She worried that he had not eaten enough breakfast before school, that he would hurt himself playing football, that a girl would break his heart. She worried when he went to his first party, where she knew there would be alcohol. And when everything seemed fine she worried that there was something he was keeping from her that she should be worrying about.
She worried that someday he would find out that he was not really her son. Jolanta worried most of all the year David turned eighteen.
She did not want her boy to join the army. But she had no choice, nor did her son. Israel was a tiny haven for Jews in a world that had built death camps for them in other places. Every Jew had a national and moral duty to serve. So in June 1967, when his country went to war, David already had served in the Israeli army for one year.
The army sent him north to the Golan. He was strong, ready to serve his country. Ready to fight.
He was part of the battalion that was supposed to provoke the Syrians into retaliation so Israel could take the Golan Heights. General Moshe Dayan instructed them to send tractors to plow in an area of little use, in a demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn’t start shooting, David’s unit was told to advance the tractors until the Syrians were provoked into shooting. They used artillery and later the air force became involved. But on the last day, when Israel attacked the USS
Liberty
, in the Mediterranean Sea, David was sent home because of an injury to his hand.
He had been wounded by friendly fire that had burned his right palm. Jolanta’s heart sank when she learned that her son had been injured, and she could find no peace until David returned home.
She threw her arms around him. “My boy! Let me see your hand.”
“It’s okay, Ma. They fixed it all up.”
She inspected him to be sure, unable to thank God enough for her son’s safety. “Are you hungry?” Jolanta was delighted to watch David eat the kreplach she had made. The kugel and blintze.
My heart won’t survive if anything happens to him
. Somewhere in the corner of her love, the secret lay in wait. She had not intended to keep the truth from David. Since the day he arrived in July 1948, everything she was or had been had converged to make her simply David’s mother. How he had come to be her son remained unsaid, a harmless butterfly in a field of love.
Now, seeing his bandaged hand, she could not bear the possibility of losing her son. Jolanta had no control over his serving in the army, but she could keep the truth hidden.
He’s my son, that’s the only truth he needs
, she decided, caging the butterfly.