Miral (11 page)

When the summer holidays came to an end and Amal returned to Jerusalem, her life could no longer be what it was before. She found herself unable to talk about what had happened, not even with her best friends, not even with Miral. She wanted to forget the whole thing. At other times, however, she would get in bed, hide under the covers, and with open eyes try to remember everything, right down to the tiniest details. She swore to herself that she would never say anything to anyone, that what had happened would be her secret.

During her sleepless afternoons, she would often feel Miral's hand stroking her hair. Amal would pretend to fall asleep, and after a little while, her friend would get up, close the curtains, and silently leave the room. Amal would have liked to speak to her, to explain, but she couldn't.

 

After Amir left her office, Hind sent someone to pick up Amal's mother and bring her to Dar El-Tifel. There was not a moment to lose.

The conversation between those two utterly different women remained one of the most difficult experiences in Hind's life.

Neither of them had ever liked the other very much. Amal's mother respected Hind but thought that the annual payment of boarding and tuition charges exempted her from the necessity of worrying about her daughters for the length of the school year. Now she had been summoned to Dar El-Tifel and therefore obliged to miss at least a day of work. For her part, Hind was certain that the woman had enrolled her daughters in the orphanage school because she considered it a fairly economical way of getting rid of them, whereas if they had stayed at home, she would have had to take care of them.

Hind began the conversation without beating around the bush. “Your daughter must have had relations with a boy this summer, and now she's pregnant.” She observed the eyes and sun-worn face of the woman sitting across from her.

“That's impossible—she's only a child. There must be some mistake.”

“Madam, we've taken all the steps necessary to verify her condition, and unfortunately there is no mistake. Do you by any chance know who the boy could be?”

“Now that I think about it, she did act strangely this summer. It was like she was—well—happy. That's it, happy.” She seemed about to add something but then stopped talking with her mouth half-open.

“And then?”

“And then, I don't know. She turned sad all of a sudden. She didn't want to go out to the fields anymore, and she would hide under her sheets and cry.”

“And you didn't ask her about the reason for this sudden sadness?”

“Look, my daughter's mood changes are no affair of mine. I already have enough to think about, what with my work and my other daughter, to say nothing of my husband.”

Hind stiffened, but she forced herself to remain calm. “In other words, you didn't notice anything. No boy in Amal's company, nothing like that.”

“No. However, if you really want to know, someone did tell me they always saw her coming home from the fields on the back of a moped, and the driver was a boy from the village. Maybe it was him. We sure won't be able to ask him, though.”

“Why not?” Hind inquired, increasingly astonished and offended by the woman's attitude.

“Because he's dead. He went to a demonstration and wound up dead. The sort of thing that happens to people who don't mind their own business.”

“I understand. Now, in regard to your daughter, we have to—”

“I don't have to do a thing, dear lady. I don't want to see that daughter of mine again. She has dishonored us!” Amal's mother exclaimed, as she jumped to her feet.

Hind could no longer tolerate the paradoxical situation. She stood up and poured herself a glass of water. “Fine,” she said. “Then you certainly won't have any difficulty signing this document authorizing the abortion.”

The mother merely shrugged and signed the paper in an uncertain hand.

“And now please go away. I don't wish to see you anymore,” Hind said, addressing the woman as firmly as she possibly could.

Amal's mother looked at the headmistress with something like supplication in her eyes. “Try to understand,” she said. “I don't want to ruin my reputation for someone like her. And if the boy's dead, we live in a little village, and—”

“A child,” Hind said, interrupting her. “Your daughter is still a child. She doesn't even realize what she's done. And you want to punish her and take away the affection she needs now more than ever. That's unforgivable. I'll take care of her future. And now please go away, and don't bother to come back for Amal next summer.”

And so the woman abandoned her daughter to her fate, and Hind decided that Amal should have an abortion. This was not an easy choice to begin with, and it was made more difficult because several members of the school council were opposed to it. In the end, Hind succeeded in imposing her will and ordered that the matter be kept a closely guarded secret. “The girl's reputation depends on us. No one must know what has happened. Believe me when I tell you that this is a painful decision for me, too, but we have no alternative,” she said at the end of the meeting.

When Miral awoke the next morning, she noticed that Amal was already up, putting clothes into a little suitcase. Hind came into the room and said, “Are you ready, Amal? The car is waiting for you in the courtyard.”

Miral watched the automobile slowly disappear down the drive. Her friend was inside and so was Dr. Amir.

A few days later, Amal returned to the school. Her face was hollow and her eyes even more so. She had recovered none of her former lightheartedness. Miral, who had been told that her friend had gone into a clinic because she wasn't well, often saw her put a hand on her stomach and one day asked her why she had needed to be taken to a clinic and what had been done to her there. Amal said it was appendicitis.

In the following weeks, she became more and more reclusive, as if she wanted to distance herself from everyone. By the time winter was approaching, the two friends were exchanging only fleeting glances. In January, Amal left for Germany, where she completed her studies thanks to a scholarship that Hind had obtained for her.

Miral would learn Amal's story only many years later, when she saw her again in Berlin. Amal was teaching architecture at a university. There she'd met her husband, who was also an architect. They had three children, and she'd named their firstborn Mustafa.

 

That winter was one of the coldest in years. One night it began to snow and did not stop until the following afternoon. Miral looked out over Jerusalem, covered totally in white; the snow had softened the contrasts between the Old City and the buildings in the modern parts of town, and the distance between the Arab and Jewish quarters seemed to have been shortened.

Miral continued to worry about Amal. The only news she had of her friend came through Hind. “There must be a lot of snow in Germany, too,” she thought; maybe that would bring them closer together. Rania was obsessed by the fear that because of the snow their father wouldn't be able to come the next day, and yet she was also leaning with her elbows on the windowsill, staring dreamy eyed, like her sister, at that magnificent white blanket that covered everything.

On the next afternoon, the lobby of their building, which at that hour was usually crowded with students' relatives, remained silent and deserted. Many of the girls, after waiting for more than half an hour, went sadly back to their rooms, for no one had passed through the gate at the bottom of the drive.

Miral and Rania decided to wait a little longer. After all, they thought, their father didn't live all that far away. Their patience was rewarded, because even though the snow had started to come down again, Jamal appeared at the gate shortly before the custodian closed it. Their father's hair was white with snow, and he was wrapped in a black overcoat. His daughters watched as he ascended the drive with uncertain steps, his black shoes sinking into a fresh drift.

Miral and Rania's joy was uncontainable. They began to skip back and forth around the room, and the clamor they made could be heard throughout the dormitories. Their papa was the only one who had braved the storm to visit his daughters.

T
hree times a week, a group of girls from Dar El-Tifel traveled to the Kalandia refugee camp, just outside Ramallah, where they would distribute food to children and keep them company for the afternoon. Some of the girls gave lessons in Arabic or mathematics, while others organized group activities like drawing or sports.

As soon as the children in the refugee camp saw the bus turn onto the camp road, lifting up a cloud of red dust, they would abandon the little soccer field, which was covered with holes and puddles, and go to meet their visitors. Miral always brought sweets and caramels and distributed them carefully, making sure that no one remained without. Her assignment was to teach a bit of English to children between four and twelve years old.

A cracked blackboard had been set into a ramshackle wooden structure that stood within a semicircle formed of rocks, bricks, and gasoline cans. There the children took their seats with composure that seemed out of place given the surroundings.

One of the boys in the first row was Hassan, an emaciated child of eight, smiling despite the casts on both his arms. Israeli soldiers had caught him and broken them by pressing down with their heavy boots. Hassan couldn't wait for the day when his casts would come off and he could start throwing stones again, even though his father had warned him to stay away from the soldiers and his desperate mother had run after him to try to bring him back home whenever there were demonstrations.

Next to him sat Said, nine years old, with big black eyes and hair covered, like the rest of him, with mud. He, too, was a regular among the rock throwers, despite the beatings he received from his father, who had already lost one son that way.

Despite the shacks of rusty sheet metal, the hovels of earth and straw, the open sewers and piles of garbage that formed a backdrop to the makeshift school, the children dutifully repeated the words Miral wrote on the blackboard, and smiled happily. “They seem almost serene,” Miral thought in amazement.

The girls from Jerusalem were the camp children's only contact with the outside world—a world that otherwise seemed to have forgotten them. Indeed, the only regular visitors to the camp were Israeli soldiers, whose reception was altogether different. The children, no matter how small, would collect stones and throw them incessantly, while older boys and young men aimed slingshots at the armored vehicles and jeeps. They knew every escape route, and when chased they would display remarkable agility.

The children told Miral that when the soldiers came at night to arrest someone, the entire camp would awaken, and the refugees would do everything they could to hamper the soldiers' efforts and to keep the wanted person from being caught. “Those are the kinds of games camp children play,” Miral thought. Brutal games that left many players stretched out on the ground.

The women of the camp did their part as well. Often, during the Israelis' nocturnal blitzes, they would defy the rigid Muslim sense of modesty by going forth from their houses half-naked to distract the soldiers and gain a few precious seconds for whoever was trying to escape by running over roofs and out into the fields.

At the end of her lesson one day, Miral went up to a boy who always stood apart from the others, leaning on a gasoline drum. At thirteen he was one of the oldest of them, with broad shoulders and a clump of long black hair that totally covered his forehead. At the end of the lesson, he would always remain motionless for a few moments, staring at Miral while the other boys ran to the muddy lot they used as a soccer field and resumed the game that had been interrupted by the arrival of the English teacher.

The boy wore a pair of wrinkled military trousers several sizes too big for him. As he watched Miral's approach, he extracted a cigarette butt from a side pocket and lit up.

“Is it me you don't like, or is it English?” Miral asked with a smile.

The boy took a long drag on what was left of his cigarette. His eyes were half-closed, and little wrinkles formed at the sides of his mouth. “It's not your fault,” he said, repeatedly shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “You're great, but I don't want to learn English. I'm the one with problems, not you.”

“If you want, we can talk about them.”

“No, it's a long story. Besides, you have to get back to Jerusalem.”

Miral was intrigued by the assured tone of the boy's response and by the expression of defiance she could read in his face, the look of one whose eyes have already seen too much suffering. She knew very little about him—only that he refused to study English, and that he had turned down a scholarship Hind had managed to find for him and four other boys from the camp to study at a school in Damascus.

“I have a little time,” she said, holding his gaze. To underline the seriousness of her words, she sat down right in front of him, on a block of cement that was part of the wall of a demolished house. Khaldun calmly put out his stubby cigarette and contemplated the other boys, who were running after a soccer ball made of rags. Then he stared into Miral's eyes, drew a long sigh, and told her his story from start to finish, hardly pausing for breath and never lowering his gaze.

“My great-grandfather died in a British prison, where he was put for joining the Arab revolt of 1936. My grandfather and grandmother died in Jordan during Black September, in 1970, when—as you must know—many Palestinians were killed there by the bedouin soldiers in the service of King Hussein. Palestinians were oppressed everywhere by Arab regimes. They killed us in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Syria, and here in our homeland. My father was a fedayee with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He met my mother in a refugee camp in Jordan, where they were fighting against the Jordanians. Then they went to Lebanon, where I was born, and where my father was killed during one of the clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers during the invasion of Lebanon. All I have left of my father's are these trousers I'm wearing and a little red book with the sayings of Mao Tse-tung. My father underlined one of them: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' I also have a photograph of him standing next to George Habash, one of our leaders, holding an automatic weapon and smiling. My father was a brave man. Now I've been living in this place for the past three years, in a tin shack with my mother, her sister, and her sister's family. Why should I learn En glish or go off to study in Damascus? I don't need that. I love to write stories, but what I need is a rifle, so I can fight and help to take back the land my ancestors have cultivated with olive trees for centuries.”

A moment later, they heard a muffled sound, a sort of sharp thud, and Miral saw the shape of a little boy not more than ten years old emerge from a cloud of dust. The boy had climbed up the side of a shack made of a couple of dry brick walls and rusty sheet metal. A brick gave way, taking down with it about half of the unsteady wall. As Miral and Khaldun ran to the shack, they heard shouts and curses coming from inside; the hovel was inhabited. The door opened and an old man appeared, crying out, “Why didn't you warn me that you wanted to bury me alive?”

Khaldun burst into noisy laughter, while Miral looked around her in search of some explanation.

After the old man calmed down, Khaldun shouted at him, “Don't worry, Yassir. The Israelis aren't demolishing your shack. It was only that idiot Said, trying to climb up on your roof again.” Then Khaldun resumed laughing, with all the joviality of his thirteen years, as he pointed to Said, who was still groaning and gasping for air amid the rubble and the dust, while shaking off bricks. As she helped Said to his feet, Miral couldn't help but smile.

Old Yassir, however, having realized what had happened, showed no inclination to joke about it. He took a few labored steps toward the boy, lifting his stick with the intention of striking him. But without the support of the knotty olive branch, he teetered and seemed on the point of falling over backward. The sequence repeated itself with each step the old man took: he would brandish his stick and totter, and Said would limp out of his range. In the meantime, Khaldun was holding his sides and howling with laughter. A dense crowd of children, women, and old men gathered, and soon the hilarity had become infectious. Yassir, his skin wizened by age and the sun, continued his improbable pursuit, and Said kept trying to get away, but the other boys prevented him from breaking through the circle of onlookers, throwing him back each time he tried to escape.

The little comedy came to an end when Yassir finally managed to give Said a blow on the head and then fell over backward. Some people ran to assist the old man, helping him up and placing him on a straw chair. Others went to fetch a few pails of water, which they poured over Said's head in an attempt to wash away the dust that covered him so completely he looked floured. When it was ascertained that the boy had survived the ordeal with only a bruise on his calf and a lump on his forehead, most of the curiosity seekers returned to their own shacks. The old man remained seated, still loudly complaining about his house. This litany was interrupted by Khaldun: “Don't worry, Yassir. Tonight you'll sleep at your granddaughter Fatima's, and tomorrow Said and I and a few other boys will fix up that wall for you so it's better than it was before. At least that'll give us something to do.”

“Thank you, my boy, thank you. You're a real prince, just like your father. You always think of others first,” Yassir said, giving him a pat on the cheek, whereupon Khaldun turned toward Miral, his eyes filled with pride.

She smiled at him with sincere admiration. “I have to go now. I'm already late,” she said. “Otherwise I'll be punished, and then they won't let me leave the school grounds for a week.”

On the bus to Jerusalem, Miral gazed back at the refugee camp and thought about Khaldun. Smoke from kitchen fires, over which women were preparing falafel or couscous, rose lazily into the sky. The boy's manner was that of a prisoner shut up in a narrow cell, who with the passage of time has grown so accustomed to reducing the rhythms of his life that he responds to external stimuli with nothing but automatic responses. More than anything else, Miral was struck by the lack of rhetoric, the absolute clearheadedness with which he summarized the dramas that had afflicted his family. There hadn't been the least trace of fatalism in his words. His proud face expressed fortitude and a focus on redemption that Miral had never seen in anyone else. Khaldun's greatest fear was not the possibility of dying in a clash with the Israeli army but the possibility of failing to do his part in his family's century-old struggle for their land. He had worked out—perhaps unconsciously—the project of his life, fashioned in every detail after the model of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather and focused on the struggle to drive out the foreign occupiers of Palestine, be they British, Jordanian, or Israeli.

“His intelligence is a more effective weapon than a rifle,” Miral thought.

Khaldun, too, thought about Miral after she had gone. He followed her with his eyes as she got on the bus for Jerusalem and wondered why such a beautiful, intelligent girl would waste her time teaching English to kids who would probably never use it. He'd been struck by the way she had looked at him as he was telling his story. She'd gazed at him without the pity he usually read in the eyes of the girls who came to teach at the camp. Khaldun had felt at ease talking to her, and that was a sensation he rarely experienced when he didn't have a rock in his hand and an Israeli tank within range.

 

The following Monday morning, Miral hurried back to school after a weekend at home, arriving just in time for history class. That afternoon the minibus took her back to the refugee camp. Miral looked at her work there differently now. On the bus she saw Muna, one of the new girls, a robust teenager who was a year younger than Miral and had long, curly hair and cheerful, calm brown eyes. She hummed continually, and when she wasn't doing that, she would speak about any subject at all and asked a great many questions, so many that the other girls complained about her. But Miral liked her.

“What made you decide to sign up for work in the refugee camp?” Miral asked Muna.

“Do you want to know the truth? There's a boy I like a lot. I met him at Dar El-Tifel and he lives in that camp. So I can see him and make myself a little useful at the same time.”

“What a noble motive!” Miral said, laughing.

Muna replied, “You have to be able to lighten up in life. Everything's too serious. I'm tired of that. I want to live, I want to have fun, and you should, too.”

“Well, here's your chance to have fun. We've arrived!”

The girls exchanged complicit glances, but Muna's smile vanished at the sight of the refugee camp. “Wow, what a dump.”

Miral remarked, “It's a real miracle just to be able to smile and have fun here. You think you can amuse some of these kids? We've brought poster paper and colored pencils. Take some, go on, and try to get them to draw a little.”

Children were already running up to the Dar El-Tifel bus to embrace the girls and welcome them. Miral took a group of five or six and started writing English sentences on the blackboard, while Muna, getting over her initial shock, gathered together about ten little ones and led them to a eucalyptus tree. There she spread a cloth on the ground, laid out the white paper and the colored pencils, and invited them to draw whatever they wanted.

Miral tested her imagination, trying to give the children a temporary escape and make them concentrate on something other than what she saw: houses of corrugated metal, where families of seven lived in rooms of only a few square meters, and open drains whose contents mingled with rainwater. The girls' visits were the only moments of normality in the refugee children's endless days.

Miral watched Khaldun, who was sitting on a big rock, with a cigarette that had gone out between his lips. He seemed to be paying attention to the lesson; the usual mocking smile had disappeared from his face. A short while later, the rumble of tanks became audible.